Lost luxuries, lost goodbyes. Lost opportunity villages, lost forever. Lost and found. Once was lost. Now am found. Find a lot, lose a lot. Remember. The memory of forever. The memory of Rembrandt. The awfulness. The offing. The offertory. The the the How repetitive. Mind is cramped, contracted. How to land. Wanting to land on an object. Wanting to observe theory. Observe theory. Observing theory. Notheory. Nothery. Nothing.
The Amazon River. The big river, the small people. Adaptation.
Lost luxuries—lost luxuries of isolation, roaming, leaving home. All the diligence, the discipline it takes, the spending and the strengthening. Part of that muscle just wants to collapse. Oh wait, that’s not the muscle, that’s the mind. What is the ethical muscle?
Stomachache. Did I say searching? Searching for a rhythm? Current, swimming against or with. Wet, water wet. Wet river, muddy. Feeling alone with it, in it. The embarrassment of my rivers series. No, I can’t. I long for the dry bed of lost rivers, Sarasvati. I have no hope. My standard life, a life that’s bled of hope. The philosophy that kills dreams and with them, disappointments, and what’s left—stomach stomach stomachache.
Sometimes there is a certain wishing, to be feverish, isolated, and to die. Dogen used these words in positive ways. “‘Lost,”‘ ‘missed’ and ‘dead’ can mean complete experience of selflessness.” (p. 21)
It is a thicket. The conifer garden is ultimately soothing. After wandering down into the marshlands, following the rotting boardwalk, achieving the stability of brown and stagnant water, she wanted then to rise. Climbing hills, across the broad lawn, observing the perennial garden now completely dormant. It wasn’t hard for me to find the isolated snowdrop, crocus, just look down. At the gate, sign says No Pets and I feel a true relief at the restriction. No footsteps mark the snowfall on the secluded upper path. Dark conifer presences so silent in their various forms, some curly needles, others quite like fans, or dark green fuzz along the branch. Winding whiteness, the brief sensation of being lost again in that small place I know so well, trickling of liquid drainage through the mushy grasses out the drainpipe.
I am lost.
Lost. Description even becomes too much of a responsibility.
Get tattoos and become a normal person. The dichotomy, the dogmatic. The woman starts to laugh. The laugh, the litany, the lost.
I am in search of some literature, I am looking for some lost literature, I am looking for some lost. There is no settling, no claiming I have found what I have not.
End of October—I blurt out in an email that there’s a reading from In Pieces, an anthology of fragmentary literature by Impassio Press in the city on October 29th. I’ll be there (but not reading). Of course, no one from class shows up, it’s not that kind of group. I’m quite excited by this gathering—there’s Guy, and Jason, Audrey, Ellis, Mary, and lovely Roy, and afterwards, I collect signatures like a giddy child and drink wine and talk of fragments and connections. It’s a lovely gathering. Outside on the plaza, in a windstorm, I fall down and break my wrist.
I miss the next two classes. Halloween is just two days away, can’t really navigate, I stay home becalmed (uncalm) in an utter slump. Unable to celebrate in any way with Sam, a masked witch in a bad mood.
The next week, I’m in New York, but entertaining Geno and Michelle after the marathon. We’re eating at Pure Food and Wine, with Blair, and baby Harry. It’s a good time although I feel phenomenally stressed by the logistics of meeting people in the city and the baby and the driving and the wrist and the expense and the phone call saying I won’t be there at class and the what the hell of all of it. But I like Michelle. She tells Blair stories of the squats in London and Berlin. Geno wrangles Harry pretty well, and Sam takes him out for little walks into the rainy courtyard. We even stop for coffee (terrible) at a nondescript, nonrecommended deli (Greek joint). Returning to my car something like the sound of a loud gong, in the Gong Show, loud and deep and fatal—parking ticket, $65, I parked at 5:40 pm somewhere where I shouldn’t have parked until 6. Just suck it up.
I catch up with the next class. I think I’ve lost the thread of Duncan’s life completely. All I know is that I’m envious of his household, alive with art and poetry and avant friends, community with all its prices and its costs. I’m envious of his ego and his correspondents. Him. Levertov. How to come to terms with what is past. That was then, you see, and this is now.
I am exhausted. Easier to maintain simplicity.
Sustainability. Burn.
I am lost. Swimming.
The text.
The reserves have lost all their tigers. A tiger reserve outside New Delhi with no tigers to show for it. A man willing to shoot to kill. My nephew going into the Navy.
The foxes coughing in the mountains. The evil fox light. Lost lore of animals lost lore of fears. Our superstitions are gone now, transformed into bombers from the air. Our strange fear of foxes or wolves following, met with turbans and robes. We do not learn much about any of this, we don’t push through it. We just take it as it lays.
The positions, the choreography of your gestures does not relate to the metrical feet, and though it should. There are metrical feet hiding in the prose, wearing veils. There are hard hearts, hard- hearted orb that rules the night. I am lost. Contemporary. The past. You can ask, you can ask to attach, you can task to attach your trash. There is nothing else to say.
I am not hungry. I lost my appetite. No dinner last night, just some mozzarella sticks, frozen and reheated at Richie’s. A glass of cold white wine. Sauce: ketchup mixed with hot sauce, tasted good. Richie and Suely slathered hot sauce on knuckles of reheated chicken meat. I watched and held my own.
I heard about Immaculée praying the rosary to survive while shut up in a bathroom for weeks, hiding from murderers.
Something I want to know? Don’t know.
I said the rosary everyday for a year. Maybe it was a school year. My sophomore year. The cheesy pearlized paint flaked off my little white first communion beads. Once I lost the rosary—it fell from my pocket. That immediate pang of irrational loss— desperation. I retraced my steps and found it, on top of a desk in a classroom. I was ashamed that someone had found it on the floor, maybe even identified it as possibly mine, and decided to place it on the desk for the owner to more easily find. It meant another person was thinking about my things.