Landscape is lent in cheap poetry to each idea: idea followed by image. We watch, across the bay, the wash of white waves upon the rocks, and awareness of boredom keeps us, for we do not feel its beauty without effort. We tell each other the obvious, to make not it but our feelings of it more secure. Is love the substance on the cliff’s edge of the cypress swept back by the vastness? Is it the fog which obscures the point romantic? At leisure, we struggle with leisure. We assert and struggle with assertions. Waters in deepening blueness and distance in its own mist don’t talk back.
1 July 1983, Mendocino