. . .“when I look back through a thicket of time I grow satisfied
not by the plain texture of my life’s story, not by the secure
structure of its becoming, but by the sheer unreliability of its
patterning, as if my self divides but I remain unaware of its
division until I return to my starting point,” the writing near the
end of the start of this same composition one year ago, the
sentence becoming a yearlong sentence that is about to loop back
onto itself through the imagination of its traceability: “I desire
completely to be transported inside the text, to take up residence
there, the way one may for a long time stare into a photograph
and actuate the contours of its prior reality that somehow brushes
against the present with such startling intensity the interval
evaporates beyond the serviceberry flowering on the hillside
above me,” bloodroot and spring beauties blossoming below the
kinglets, the minor whitewater sound of the river as it runs across
a wide scattering of stones, the memory of the writing “fading
and growing with intensity as the clouds come and go and I find
my footing upon the trail, where there is nothing profound,
where there is no profundity in the long-beaked sedge, only this
song of visibility to carry further into the day as I remember the
various forms of assignment I have given myself to justify the
splendid non-being of my mind in relation to the ironwoods”—
“The corona has shrunk to twice the size / of the moon and
there is nothing left to / type from the notebook as I take off my
/ reading glasses to watch two milkweed / seeds unfolded from
the bundle of seeds / in an open milkweed pod but still /
attached lift and fall in the breeze, the / text blurring every time I
turn my eyes / back to the screen and the seed inside the / looser
pod // inside the looser pod becoming, to my / accustomed
eyes, sharper and more central // Jordan said in the space of
reading / Austerlitz he couldn’t sleep and was trying / to give up
the notion of the loss of place / when at nine he moved from
Marquette / to Antioch, a coincidence of time and / place that
joined the day to a particular / landscape and left it lost in the
new one / Also Owen is eight soon nine and they /might move
also, revisiting the / coincident loss on the child,” “which
patterned for me the mimicry of desire, that is, the desire to go
outside and become a thing in a world despite already being a
being in the world, the desire to be more than oneself through
the observation of the outer world and its way of becoming
internalized through this music we bring forward to the moment
of composition” — “it is good that a year still feels like a long
time, my sense of who I am now not being entirely coincident
with who I was then, a promise for the possibility of change that
I am no longer recognizable to myself in the present moment
looking back at myself in a previous time,” this thought inscribed
onto the page causes me to pause, stand up, and approach the
bedroom window where I look down onto the garden that I was
writing about only a few minutes ago, it being summer in the
poem’s garden but not in the world: “I fetch a field knife to
harvest arugula and beet greens, and as I kneel down to cut the
tallest plants in the row I notice how clean and fresh the leaves
are from yesterday’s rain, the leaves had lain down upon the straw
after the shower only to rise up again in the morning’s sun that
now streams through the kitchen window as I open the patio
door and step inside, fill up a canning jar with water to hold tall
stems of spearmint that will keep well in the ambient air for
several days or more,” although, the season is quickly shifting as
the snowfall melts and the Carolina wren mixes its caroling with
the high song of the chickadee, soon vultures will arrive tipping
their long wings to soar high on thermals above the river valley,
snow trillium will part the browned leaves on the forest floor,
nettles will appear beside the creek, the season will shift fully and
this moment will be its own retrospect along the cascading
overfills of beauty and its interlays of grief — “But most
musicians can’t hear a single sound, they listen only to the
relationship between two or more sounds / Music for them has
nothing to do with their powers of audition, but only to do with
their powers of observing relationships,” there’s a gap in the
classroom discourse that allows the outside world to start
trickling in as I walk to the window that overlooks the canopy of
several oaks, and after a long period of silence I offer the
question, what is the author trying to say here, which is met by
more silence until finally a student at the back of the classroom
answers that there’s a difference between listening and doing —
is that a little strong, I’m wondering, “interlays of grief,” I can’t
really concentrate any longer, I am tired, that’s all I know, and
everyone else is tired, yet the poem continues and I open Vogel’s
book to read: “we come to language / as architects of relation –
// but sentences are not secure // we take them up as planks /
and make unstable geometries // a book arrives in threads – ” it
being a book about bird nests and also the way language and
memory combine to form nests, interweaving hundreds of
strands of various materials, sometimes human-made materials
like newspaper or book scraps where words are printed, or
leftover linen thread that would bind a book together, the
question of whether the robins in my backyard would build a nest
out of thin strips of poems, reminding me of Lisa’s poem: “Now
when I brush my hair I take the hair out of the brush and instead
of putting it in the compost container on the sink, I put it outside
in the grass for birds to find and use” — while I was writing the
previous lines, I originally removed the quotation marks around
the writing from April 15, 2021, and considered whether or not
those lines maintained a fluidity that was desirable only a few
moments ago as I read those lines without their borders into the
air of the room where I now find myself, then I again inserted the
quotation marks around last year’s writing, it having been, for a
brief period, this moment’s writing, before deleting the following
passage: “being only myself, it appears, that I can inscribe upon
the page despite the distances I create between myself and the
text, it is obvious in this sounding-out that I become nothing
more than words, and I’ve decided that this is problematic and
slightly off-key following the line, ‘through this music we bring
forward to the moment of composition,’ but now I find myself
quite uncertain about both of those choices as the wind gusts and
the red buds of the red maple bend forward in their reddening,
‘as I crouch to examine the large-flowered bellwort rising from a
wreath of trout lily and hepatica leaves, its yellow flowers
drooping at the end of thin stems, and as I lean further to see if I
can view the inside of a flower without propping it up, my ear
nearly touches the ground as my cheek brushes the ephemeral
leaves from which the bellwort rises’”. . .