Journal

1.

Solus I thought trying to remember my way

to saltus, leap

forget.

Through a door that knows no tool.

A special salt that bends the waters to you.

I a special you. A temple built on a door 

and you can’t see the bottom.

But the world etched deep in its surface 

face pressed to the window of your father’s car.

2.

Ananke, necessity

translated as desire:

hallowed

by us hollow ones,

listening to the wind

mind splashing through its blue cave

goats and lions

thinking at the water’s edge.

3.

I’m having episodes

more me climbs onto another road

Winter expeditions, through the cold of absence (in which illusions might interpose), distance (to ensnare us right at home). Following what they could, auguria ex avibus, to the heat of you, those first natural scientists. First ones, boiled clean in desire– readied in the ark over fire and water to rebuild the gates of our senses. To open sense. And be made therein, by what making can explain only in snatches: what we make is what we know, ourselves. Is never that; to see what breeches over the horizon. Pherecydes was the first to disregard ‘the fetters of verse, and to write in desultory language.’ Discursive language. But history is different. Cadmus was the first historian.Who set the snake soldiers against each other, and glimpsed what was beyond them. That’s what Pliny was just telling me, and he said all we know about death is that we return to the state from before we were born. That’s all we know, that tells us. Snatches of things, things, clues, birds, the feeling signals. Gates come to their senses opening by themselves.

4.

You can hear the train go by

on its way to being heard

here, and somewhere else, too

sun walking through a closed book.

I say these things from the comfort of your sleep:

stairs anyone can use; stars hugging the roof.

5.

You know what you need to forget. I was a page helping you get your shoes on as you squirmed to help, resist against the big chair body’s necessity forgetting its way to childhood. I’m just a Roman I don’t know anything I keep thinking about putting shoes on you and counter-squirm, hip digging back against what thought buoys up this is the only clue all I know about me. She offers me her foot.