what can be safely carried
like crows cooked with oatmeal
or left alone
toss advice, crack it like an ax
breathe fire and marginalia

what can be wrong
washed, tolerated unfamiliar
under a leaf realize
little green bullets
or blackberries

drive a truck through each false
allusion
and recede

water, like small silver bells
waits, distant
moving through molecules of desert air
eating every saturday, teach it
to answer

Lyn Hejinian from A Border Comedy

Just as you’ll note that breathlessly though wordily I’ve been making micro-
scopically libidinous movements
Toward your nebulous rosy and always retreating body
Which feathers a mention
And needles in question
And is ever in flight between
But I will have it
The daring statement unites us
Going by the longest way—the roundness (211)

Lyn Hejinian from "The Rejection of Closure"

In the gap between what one wants to say (or what one perceives there is to say) and what one can say (what is sayable), words provide for a collaboration and a desertion. We delight in our sensuous involvement with the materials of language, we long to join words to the world--to close the gap between ourselves and things--and we suffer from doubt and anxiety because of our inability to do so.

Yet the incapacity of language to match the world permits us to distinguish our ideas and ourselves from the world and things in it from each other. The undifferentiated is one mass, the differentiated is multiple. The (unimaginable) complete text, the text that contains everything, would in fact be a closed text. It would be insufferable.

Daily Tao

Sunday, 17 January, 2010 :: 29


Do you want to improve the world?
I don't think it can be done.

The world is sacred.
It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it.

There is a time for being ahead,
a time for being behind;
a time for being in motion,
a time for being at rest;
a time for being vigorous,
a time for being exhausted;
a time for being safe,
a time for being in danger.

The Master sees things as they are,
without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way,
and resides at the center of the circle.

sonnet

"Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom."
--Shakespeare Sonnet 116


That breaking lesson purchased and forgotten
creeps between time's appetite, keen
like maladies eager, appealing every sense
shaken, unknown, fair past reason
music, without name, disgrace, full of blame.
Bliss, once proved straight
Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame
breathless living lips blush, a gentle gait.
False, or foul sweet fingers sound
doubting impediments prove, urge, accuse.
Accidents dream in red, delight cruel
raven eyes surmise, wandering slander.
What with bold reason hated
Ever perfumed, only pleasing, faded.