The omission of the comma makes it imperative. You is understood. An insignificant device meant to be overlooked in its subtlety a convert conditioning, unconscious bending. Landscape, Distant light over fields of heat, shaped here as a mantle blue, as wind, meets flush on your skin, gentle warm, as it would be seen blue, if it were blue, to see it bending, currents. You are standing here, before fields folding hills, creased in time, elemental streams, distant erosion rhymed in contour foreshortened in this moment. You have time just to think, shaped here as thought bent, as the fields are bent to a blue horizon. Let that be an open window. I can see it. The omission was to be a joke, a fly, in through the opening but intending to rest there too, panelessly impossible. This makes omission, takes away the play. This leaves effort without intension. I cast about; I draw it out. This leaves me with wind, and colors: five primary senses. Each touch a line; each smell a hue. I have another vision. You’re walking. It could be raining, or in a city. You wish it weren’t raining. It rains, and you have nowhere to go. Wind chills your damp face. Hands cram cold fingers tight in pockets. Get out, she said, in the bottom of a pocket. Water everywhere is gray. In the storm an ocean edge smashes wet on barnacled and mossy rock, withdrawing and crashing, mist, sure in its roar. Before, you might have thrilled to it, set dry within a warm car growling wet a fierce river, fast in a room you made to let the rain be a window, wind wiping water raining on your brow, gray jeweled gobules forming regrouping to slide down the pane. Now, it soaks you through, it fills you full of it. You’ve had enough, and more of it makes dreams of threads impossibly dangling, where each attempt to grasp it leaves wet emptiness falling. Maybe I know about this. So what. Maybe I’m wrong—for you, but of course this is my dream. See nothing, because nothing works. You are full of it. I call forth the demons to be absolved. A stone wall, gray signs advertising ends to means you can’t afford, a passing car. Restrictions and obscure erosions. Drink to drown the grass, wavering, the light afire in its liquid wash. Inability a mountain. Worry creasing age patterned by the brick pressed hard against your brow sweating. A chair and a bedroom shutting you, a wind, out a window.
26 November 1971