Fish Leaf

FISH LEAF

fragment epic

Note: It is happy to think of a school of minnows, a very small fish that has much in common with mosquitofish, as a ‘forest,’ first for the reason that one can say ‘a forest in a creek,’ but also because the many-towered shape of a forest is the only possible match for the way the vertical shadows of minnows fall onto each other, over the minnows, slanted, erasing one another; but also somehow the minnows themselves, and the shadows which can’t be said belong to which minnow, are like a forest maze, or a forest for deer, through which a minnow by itself may run and, by running this way, sets the trend for all the other minnows that then suddenly rush through this trail which was made fertile by the footsteps, so to speak, of the very first deer who thought to move. This note only says that it is happy to think of minnows as a forest in water.

And this may be a happy and useful thing to say, first off. Lastly, if something is ‘seen’ (blue colored word) it is ‘understood’ (green colored word).

Even more lastly everything in this epic fragment has a sound and the free motion of the alliteration has everything in it the meaning of minnows scattering, running in the essence of the greentime. Likeness to Chinese poetry is born out of the general inability of one to surmount his bloodline.

If something is happy to think, one should think it. And if one can see in a happy way, that is a way of seeing. Of this, this is a simpleton’s thought which can give no money for studying.

MINNOWFISH

Come! I will show you where the sleep-going dead descend the stairs. The steps that lead down to the homeless shelter…

That white wall has been worn pink, and cracked, by sunny morning days, by, in turn, remorseless winter tides of fishes that rose with the seasons of the ocean, as the great heart of the sea burned.

Then, during hot and relentless, balmy winters, that old shelter sat, quietly, bubbling, breathing carefully, while around it, eating it of its careful, white greenery, small rainbowed schools of minnows grazed. Upon them, the darts of the burning on high sun sought out in their spear-shaped shadow the notation of the future by which the next minute’s forest of their movement might be found; on high the sunshine plucked thousand boomerangs of fire—the whole world under siege these baked winters—swooning, shimmering ten generations of humankind to their long white bricks, building upon this former shelter the house of the dead; that is, knowing everywhere its name death except in the sling against the little minnowfish whose little plucked shadow still held out against the sun. The death of mankind is the death of mankind; underneath its house the waiting pit has long been dug out.

6.18.2021

SHALLOW RISEN SEA

Flows the clarity over the small sundry of the world of the risen tides. Sunlight opens the halls of the sky. Sunshine parts the ripples. Clean clouds part in two as the brown color can be seen, bricks, the sunken edge of roof, fresh planks sticking out to dry off. And through the gaps of the sundry small fish float slowly, now and then dragged by the long tidal drift that extends evenly, slowly getting back into place, where they ought to be. Here these fish know, over the thin sunken rooftops, that they are in the right place: they are within the heart of summer.

A little child on a boat uses an oar to cross this shallow sea. His huge shadow falls over the fish.

“Welcome,” he smiles to himself. “Welcome…”

During noontime a large carrying cloud passes overhead, and the fish know just where to go, tracing the waving, crisp and vague line of the shadow as they go where the sun-warming brown, of the brick and dirt beneath, regains its warm composure across this shallow sea.

LEAF

SLOW SUMMER HEAT WAITS AND BIDES

waves slowly the leafclumps…

The waterflow runs greensmoothly and minnows, with all their friends, form forests through which they friends themselves scamper helter skelter, floating, without pace an Atlantis maze of greenwater truth running. A child on a leafboat comes drifting, through. He watches his rippled image halfway, ice into the water, waving, for fun, hello. To gust about, he waves a magic korok leaf.

The sunny day is caught in warm blurs of waves, of unhappy caughten the days make against that jagged racket; rippling the air with gold divisions.

He extends his long arm to the tip of the leaf.

‘Why, hello leaf.’

Small, he looks around.

Beneath a leaf’s sail the little boy’s shadow falls into the approaching water that under goes the boat, but that water does not drag deathward shadow of the leaf, of the standing brave boy but forgets it under the chum boat that floats. Always, the green water truthfully flats him there, his head round, shoulders the lengthshadow of the oar—and the sail—darkening in clear figurine the clean brown flow.

But that boat knows no violence. No dragging under of the shadow of his life.

He tides, slowly. Doubts are falling into the water ahead of him. The undergoing flowing water always forgets everything.

Now the leafboy knows, in the running of water, that he sees curious things.

Green are his feet, green are his feats of bravery, of standing and sifting the tide creek, although he is but a little boy, oaring in the tiding of times where, although green floats upon the water mirroring the trees and his face, at any moment – the tides full of quaking moments where each second could be decisive for all eternity – his feet may be upturned; his feats of bravery snapped up in the mouth of the snapping-turtle.

Whose shell was previously but a horny rock that the leafboy thought to inspect. Fun times meet bad times… that’s what’s known!

Needless to say, all are all forsaken eventually. Under the blue sky, green trees wave. But under the water, the cities of the earth waive life.

Under the shadow of him that floats alone the flat boy upon the sparkling green – friend to the leafboy – shall be dragged, again; under both the leaf where he stands and his green feet themselves until that boy learns to forget, forgiving himself everything, floating upon a boat float. Until, one day, he reaches dry land…

Then he can help his shadow out from under his boat, embrace the bodied thing that labored.

Until then, flat on the sparkling green, his shadow will be dragged—the leafboy will stand in the sun.

Cast out of floating clay, the sun wanders honeybees, blotting its rays out. They blame the boy. Himself he cannot forgive; out of this selfishness his shadow’s dragged under the boat.

Day made of sparkling green, who is he to stand, leaning, against that sail, his brow heavy with life?

Who is he that he weeps?

The day is ashamed of him. His friend who is chained to his ankles, silent companion, constantly breaks open, as a minnow rises in it, out of the needles ripple with light the green shadow.

Who are you to be sad, oh young one?

Do not be ashamed; one day he’ll forgive you. Your shadow will stand up and say: truly, I am willing to be with you; your tears I find amusing.

‘Your darkness does not push me away, for I was from darkness made.

‘I am yours truly, sincerely I will not sign you away; so long as you live.’

They pass an idol fallen into the water, a Russian doll whose head is a mosaic of blue and red; the tiles and her sunken face look up as the adorable out of the drowned greenbrown waters that let some of her shoulders be seen. Her face is enamel tan. Smooth, hard, it is cracked a little by the slow potter of the sunshine. Her cracked smile shows clean white teeth.

Small, holding the sundial of his sail, the boy watches the shadow of the laboring sun.

‘Clockwise motion is the motion of a sundial,’ he whispers. ‘But the day is too golden. Your shadow walks against the clock—it stretches – ’

‘I can’t help but wander,’ he whispers. ‘I was set free, thrown over a bridge one day. I miss my friend the stick-bug. If I die, I go where I can’t meet him again.’

‘The clock ticks in my favor. Yes yes, if I rush to the end of the creek, flowing out to sea, I will never see the stick-bug again.’ He, too, was tossed into the creek; a child wanted them to race. ‘No no, if I stay in the current, the stick-bug will not find me again.’

‘Some can float in the tides. Others can’t.’

—That’s life.

Still he can feel the shadow of the sundial trying to strain against its direction. ‘Don’t try,’ the little boy said. ‘My thing isn’t worth it.’

‘Spend your effort elsewhere; such as going clockwise and making sure the clouds go west.’

For some time, in the flowing shallows, white bands were flowing until here in the smooth motion an intricate cloud appeared. The leafboy looks at the green leaf drifting upon the cloud.

‘That’s me! —Welcome to me!’

All’s a little colder, just slightly…

‘This cooler air, upon my leaf skin – isn’t it time for me to find a companion? Yes, isn’t it time for my loneliness to end?’ says him, stroking his chin.

‘I’m lucky to be able to float wherever I go. Yes, my leaf even lets me go a little bit upstream…’

The leaves yellow and green life the trees are waving victory…

The waterflow runs greensmoothly, and beneath that soothing the boy is dragged, hatefully, by the sun and the shadow; under the boat his life goes, even…

And beneath the boy the boat drags, recklessly, his friend the shadow that was his sole companion under the boat the little boy, dragged by the flow as the shadow of him forgets the boy in the light.

Is dragged, shining in the sun he stands casting his shadow in front of him and forgetting it, always, in the waterflow that undergoes the boat and does not drag deathward him who now stands—cast—by the sun.

And what happens next in life can never be said, for the waterflow grounds the shadow of the boy under the leaf that never leaves him and by the sundial of it.

The water flowing grounds the shadow of the boy.

Under the boat, where the water goes, drags the shadow of him who stands. He does not know where his friend the stick-bug has went. Constantly he doubts life; he does not know whether or not he wants to live. Yet the life time tides slowly in the water going under him. The shadow of him, sparkling, in the sorrow of his mind, he does not know where his friend the stick-bug went.

In the sun; his toes clean, cast out of astonishment, –

The waterflow runs underground the boat, each time towing the boy under the shadow of him, cast out of the brown sun’s clay, burnt to a crisp as the question of him stands flaking with over-heated over-the-ground clay. But beneath him the green leaf glides over the greenflow until, blown by the green wind of forgetting he gathers that he stands in the sun while the green blue doubts of him glide deathward the shadow of the dark dark blue time of the water.

Cast out of the sun’s rays, burning bright as the ellipse of him gets forgot under the leaf, till the quivering sail and the fanning of the heat of the sun helps him find himself, standing there, immolant in the sun, his shadow all forgotten under the boat flow.

The real feel of the flow is not without the fear of death.

A lost-soul minnow drifts towards the brown murk under the grotto, his soul dulled…

That minnow just forgot.

The minnows with their wits skirt about the border of the tree hollow, that grotto where dwells a thing that accumulates out of the darkness, hanging about to see if their friend will gather his wits again and come back.

The root of tendrils hanging down scare them; mixing and matching, roots appear as upside-down forests that slowly begin to replace their forest … however they know where their friends are, the twitching, droplets of roots begin to displace their skin senses. Roots are still drinking ghostly hoping for the dead tree. They are still waiting to see if everything will happen again, tuber resurrection roots ignorant of the minnows, just digging about for the right time.

But to save the soul-lorn minnow, the minnows drift in hope to gather the sense of their friend before the darkness accumulates in the brown and shape of the horror-struck thing finishing its horned body from the wavering brown shadows.

Beneath the gray root light the minnowfish cannot tell apart what ripples the gray black deep from the slivers of their bodies. The low ebbing of the brown murk has put their slivers into the home of the dead. Nothing can be traced in the root shadows, rippling.

How many friends remain? How many are but roots that clutch?

Fish of little memory, blameless, that fish would have simply gone its way in carelessness, in the sway of the flow that led him deep down through it all.

Minnow, miniature, minor things…

As the song goes:

The day will come when the creek will dry.

Some have already lain their eggs –

The day of the wriggling in the sun;

fly, and beetle, and spider, minnowfish that fish

for happiness, greenery and photosynthesis

cannot forestall this feeling. And the life

in perpetual fear; of the drift into the unknown.

No big fish—because the waters dry

every season. They will die twitching,

jumping in each other’s bodies, trying to get

to the sinking water of the sinking pit,

where they would never go, scattered-over

by the dying, drying water-striders,

spidered over by their gangling legs

that jump and seize

in the shrinking pit.

All will be a bundle of nerves exposed to the hot, bitter, all-the-while evil sun that formerly was the sun of forgetting. In thousands to be plucked in their keenness by the bees that come.

Still. That friend has forgotten this memo of the sun: every day can be lived like this, catching mosquitos, swimming in the sun, cooling down in the shallows – finding cool new rocks.

Beneath a leaf’s sail the little boy’s shadow falls into the approaching water that under goes the boat…

He tides, slowly. Doubts are falling into the water ahead of him. The undergoing flowing water always forgets everything.

Rising, a winsome turtle rinses in the sun; his awkward, working legs swim in the filth of his own murk never cleansed in clear brown sun. Horned toe against shadowy boot, sans freedom, without a float, under life’s hard horn, he cannot get free of his doubts in the water’s knots. Tyrant in too much silk, too many of the entanglements against his kicks thrashing down the surface air—tangling with bubbles—enswirl his hard, stupid feet with ribbons and socks.

‘The turtle cannot float out of his contract with turtledom and being turtley,’ the little boy thinks. ‘He can’t help being him-ish.’

He fondles his chin. Small, he looks around.

‘That last life was well spent, in loneliness,’ he concludes. ‘But now it’s time to find a companion in life’s smooth motion.’

The water, truthfully running, flows beneath gliding snakes smooth tongued with long lasting time. Always the water goes on without losing its way…

For a long time this creek has flowed in this backyard, the forest of weeds.

There, the under greenwater minnows are always scattering harmoniously, as if waiting for a scattered thought to form to make them take form.

The scampering fish underneath him form, staying still and not drifting, by fanning the sea air with cooling fins, a forest in relenting, unafraid time.

Water not moving them … the sun casts, often, its die upon the scattered waves, tossing handful coins of madness, upon the shattering crests that regroup their loss as another wave.

How do waves feel?

The crest breaks and the waves say never again so golden a crest. Never again will fish swim and darken within the snake of the wave that appeared.

But for every bright second that hope gives up in the waters—the wave gathers again, not to be bet against in the real boomerang motion of life, which spends and spends, sending a little wave from itself … till the prodigal son departs forever and a younger brother takes his place and waits until the older brother, hearing of this born young joy, comes back … as a wave sends a little swooping boat down, then up on the risehill sends it swooping back—as like this logic of to-and-fro—even the fish consent that it is possible that the wave sent forth from the parent waves may again be gathered again somewhere and be met where all the waves gather—concentric encircles in the cistern of time—whose center always hears, eventually, from the ripples it sent to the walls of the well, bouncing up with a droplet of joy with each returned ping; it is no small thing to believe that for the waves such a well exists somewhere where though down a creek in linear time the wave is lost there a counterpart as recompense forever encircles the center of the well and again and again do the waves play without ever losing each other, ever again, in the heaven of the waves.

‘Until the huge day comes!’ thinks the boy, apropos of nothing. ‘Alone until the huge day.’

His thoughts are carried forth by the scattered crests of the lighting up of the waves. They crest from nothing but green body of minnows’ motion.

The minnows are the unconscious made fish.

‘Until the huge day comes…and every coin of sun spent upon me heedlessly turns out to be spent in my favor. Every single thought taken out of the free fish motion is a free coin.’

Render unto the Caesar of heaven coins gambled heedlessly as are the thoughts by the creek that are not thought in vain but as profit unthinkable, full of glory.

Do not think ‘blue, blue’ or ‘green, green.’ Only think and see what is blue green, running with time.

The unafraid, gambling heedlessly upon the scattered waves, shattering the waves…

Then the sudden exchanges, the hijinks and switching places of tricky fish.

Float the minnows; forest casting vertical shadows down disappearing minnows below which, throwing the same problems, disappear where there was no minnow at all, agglomerating on the forest floor, as tadpole shadows of knotted tails across sunflint sand. Where the recipe of that agglomerated shadow was concocted, no one can tell, but that the center of reality was not clear nor did that center seem especially stable or centered. But what fell hand arises to say where means the unstable definitions, unstable forest, of falling, slanted shadow erasing even the one who cast the shadow, behold the one minnow easing its way free of the maze of many levels, beholding itself as the slim center of this mansion’s real mobile compartments and, a blank block, moves the clarification of a channel, a canal running through the city of the minnows as if the many aisles of worshippers cleared the path for the one who simply thought to move. The trend is set by the trendsetting minnow which, this hint at a scattering asunder, hints the fly suggestion to the suggestible, now slightly drifting minnows, fashioned to think in accordance with the center of reality that by attraction drifted altogether, gathering the gravity of these things that are set trending in the free motion green time. That minnow has moved “across,” moved up and towards the left, though how much to the ceiling of their real minnow world cannot be said, only the feeling of a word that has arose and walked across a sentence.

The crazy minnow that trendset for the school has been lost, switching places a dozen times with all the others, and has become, perhaps—by magic change—a mere shadow that was formerly the mean of things all.

Quivering shadow of the minnow… Silently the shadows sleep on the creek sand.

Where was I, lost in the greentime…?

The upper rapids have been gathering white bands for some time and now feed the smooth motion space with one motionless, intricate white cloud.

The leafboy looks at the green leaf drifting upon the cloud. ‘That’s me! —Welcome to me!’

All’s a little colder, just slightly…

‘This cooler air, upon my leaf skin – isn’t it time for me to find a companion? Yes, isn’t it time for my loneliness to end?’ says him, stroking his chin.

‘I’m lucky to be able to float wherever I go. Yes, my leaf even lets me go a little bit upstream…’

Not everyone is the child of nature’s fortune. So long as he lives, that turtle can never be like the leafboy. Always he struggles in the shadow from which he cannot arise. He eats herbs, fallen insects, never touching the minnows; he never gets what he wants, he only lives in the warm brown water.

The turtle dives his head under the water again, then raises it tentatively; as a dragon island drifting…

‘I take my days one at a time,’ says the boy. ‘As long as I have things to do, I don’t doubt life.’

‘I am not very happy. And yet I feel as if, deep down, the core fact of me is happy. Why is this?’

The turtle wonders aloud, opening his beaked mouth: ‘That is because, that is because…’

Then, quite dismayed, his forehead swimming against the afront of the water, he sinks his head under again, never knowing how to say what feels true inside.

The waterflow flows greensmoothly and minnows, yes’s in the water, formed constantly by the living current, moving as one with the water’s desire dancing, fill up with shadows the waterunderflow so that these slits within itself evenly spaced deform chockfull with fish which – minnows scatter – speed through the bed of their own creation changing and reforming the holy water. For every minnow body is fusted in a body, constrained Time until the shadow slit allotted begins to squirm, then set free by the living current to fasten in the flow of the creek a forest – standing for a second that shall stand in the halls of what the water saw forever. Abraham’s stars and sand… The water lets go, every second, and sees its grand progeny sibling playing amongst themselves foresting mazes and building floating beaches –

Of gray green gold-brown shadows on which, glinting in the sun on arched body, a rube lands upon them and the ‘beach’ minnows scatter, laughing silently in the grand old water full of laughter, jolly until the day of its death; when the water season ends late Autumn and all the minnows are dried up in the sinking water of the sunken pit and eaten by spiders.

Yes, the yellow day counts aloud how many sun-glints bend up out of the leafgreen waters, counting, constantly – upon the minnows to glint a script in the golden green deep.

Throwing sun shine upon sun shine spite quite heedlessly, and spending coins without thought, just to see one more minnow leap up, one more minnow scatter. Yes, the sunlight loves the minnows! The circle sun fanning its fins with heat, greenly loves the minnows that swim and float a fat belly, fart and belch sunning themselves within circles of their own making, as they obfuscate themselves and get a little orphan lost in their midst before becoming the way in which the orphan gets free.

Well, yes and yes…

Who does not feel happy, next to a creek?

To feel every living, quivering thing; it is no wonder that the leafboy standing unalieved upon his float boat can hardly oar in the tiding of time. Hard it is; to know that he, too, shall be hurled thither where he knows not.

To feel the fish all twitching, the nerves of the spring grass seeking announcements and fliers in the wind, the grass seeds writing on the walls of houses.

To full up with the quick twitching nerves of the ground earth and the under-ground, single bear earth.

That sleeping bear earth sometimes wakes a little, displacing an arm, cleaving in two a mountain range that turned out only to be the crevasse of its armpit. A little fart, and the whole of reality quakes…!

The leafboy, tiding slowly the creek, soaring about when he wants on his leaf-sail, waving his magic solar korok leaf that lets him—single in this power!—go a little bit upstream, senses under his feet leaf the passions of the shivering waters…

One day, he remembers, he and his friend the stick-bug were playing in a yard, in some forest of weeds, and they were plucked up and tossed into the creek, as race-boats, to see who would go faster; one day he was thrown over a bridge by a bored child, who wanted to see, in his loneliness, which leaf would swim more quickly and abandon his sight, who wanted, alas, just a little more friendship and fraction of life in the leaves of the yard where his boredom is very strong. He and his best friend, who used to live under the same red mushroom together, were made to race each other to the death, an object of sport for the child who has nothing to do but play on his own in the grand suburban backyard. But some can tide the flow of life; others can’t and are taken away forever.

Floating, standing on his boat, to the leafboy it is almost too much to feel all the quivering nerves of grass, hardly can he gather it in one hand before, sensed deep down, his day is plucked from him and he goes where there is zero chance of meeting the stick-bug ever again.

Becoming full with feeling, he casts his body shadow into the waters, trying to forget in the shivering of the waters. He tides slowly.

Small, he weeps into his hand.

7.20.2021 [unfinished]

The smooth gold motion of the morning sunlight always astounds the leafboy.

Then there are smooth waters where a trial has been fastened, a wave constantly emerging, where, sunk below, a stronger rock fastens above itself a minor rapid and clear flowing waterfall that has nothing to do with the rippled image of its stone, serious self.

…invisibly meeting the giant underwater and, there, that fastened point sends out a wave from itself more constantly then any other wave, sugaring the water with sweet smooth beautiful tiny waves moment

after moment, as of ice sculptures.

Overflowing of the ideas, it was this idea that gave birth to the notion of the parent wave losing its child. And that idea, thus, to the well of gathered waves; that is the heaven of the waves. And by this logic one proceeds towards a proof of the heavens. Proof; one proceeds towards an emptied well.

GREEN FORESHOREMAN

Another arose, who had never heard of the leafboy, who had also lost something to the seaward flow…

How many times shall the green foreshoreman test the flow of the clementine waters, his oar keen under the orange trees whose peels have a fragrance sonorant, meaningful, soothing as underwater bells.

How long shall the long foreshoreman swear off the sweat of his brow, working to what departed end, tiding dark waters already rippling his soft green hallelujah one into a night ocean.

Under the orange tree, a forest of shadows buzz with honey bees.

Shall he swear away the promise he made – ?

He does not know if it is his shadow that curses him, under the boat, or on high the mandate that can’t be run from, mandating life.

He cannot forewarn his agony not to touch him, lest they both die.

Agon of the sky, the friendly man cast as a thousand coins, frame by frame glinting silver sun of what he cannot forget; beneath the shadow cursing him, the leaf shadows that annul those curses, beneath the clemency of the waters the bells ring not alone for fish and minnows, and were he to be here where are no thoughts, his ripples by the free fleeing million motion of the fish, he would in fact be granted freedom to fall apart fully and wracked and be a green motion.

The hymns of the fish would not keep him together, but enswirl him until he wracks himself out, as a kind of wall that silences his hearing of him, so that he may wrack himself out.

The fish shall not hymn him together again, but move freely for he has become emptied out, and pure leaving, just one more form for them to take the shape of before leaving out for another play towards the sea.

How long can the foreshoreman take all this living, not cleaned in the waters; how long can he tide the not-him part of him, all too him, that has none of the himishness that his loved one loved, which like the shadow cursing his brow, his crazed eyes, nots him and wants him first to hate the thought of the not-dead of him, but to step off the boat, touch toes in the water, tinkle the bells, the free motion home of fish under where your body will be green, and a hymn –

To become a green time, without fear, with the peal of the bell. And yet to become the greentime, would be to break the promise.

The not-him part of him wants him to forget; that he must be strong, and lively.

Under the orange tree, such fragrance. Such oranges mirrored in his face, such a resplendency, and still he cannot face himself but when his him-exactness is broken by the rising bob of oranges.

How long, will he be able to look at his own face, even as the pink fish bloom, and the old blossoms land in the summer water.

Above the bridge, over the creek, stands the giant child, whose shadow frame by frame slams the waters that move…

He has been got wrong, says the foreshoreman, looking at the child’s face; he is not as awful as he believes; truly – he has been framed. The accusation may be immense, he counsels, but it falls upon someone else.

Glory, glory! ring the bells underwater. Glory, glory, the long foreshoreman hears. Short is your suffering; frame the child as the sin of your shadow, in his darkness where no one sees – depart, step off the boat, come hither where nothing matters, annihilate your soul; your green loved is dead.

8.11.2021

TURTLE

Were that life to begin again; the turtle turtling the gold, brown waters would ascend out of the ripplestone of himself, kicking off the gold, brown boots, wouldst that he merge the fly that rested just once on his shoulder, that broke the gold, brown with a pink wing, would that the ripplestone flower forever and drop his boots forever in the sand and thus combined all the way down a flowered turtle to a dissipated gold brown turtle, this ghost in love arises to heavenly out ripple circles, heaving them towards the heavenly rims…

Green time me, oh ancient one

Were that my love for the fly to be complete, and were we to be one forever, lying in the green, brown water, were that I a sailor and not a turtle, and could take her and I down the river, the current and flow out to the sea, happy to abide with the many times.

Alas I am only a turtle, and the mowers are upon the rims of the forest. I do not know when I shall be a happy turtle again.

The green sun of forgetting

The bells are under the water, but still the sun cannot spell out, first, the lines on the surface, neither by consequence the sunken glorification of the iron tombs, in whose overturned wells little fish whirl, swirl in a second echo.

Where are the next glittering ripples in the eternal spray?

…wondering what is wrong with him, as the brown ripples cross him out continuously; formerly the garden paradise testifies to what violent foliage he produced, framed by him most gloriously as gilt upon a painting; but now that paradisal fire wans very mediocrely…

Times of the great sun, how to fuse the hero with the visuals?

Flaming, the sun said two words: ‘Let—go!’

Forgive, forget, and… ‘Let your pain be a coin.’

—Take heed!

I have no secret hidden behind an iron tower, overhung with ivy; my jokes are lame – a secret somewhere, well it must have been misplaced in all the greening – daily life, being what it is – meeting new suns, calling the moon – listen up, you! I never had anything – really – to say; out there, full of mystery, other stars obscure themselves; I thought for awhile to be mysterious, to pregnate myself with thought and hard-thinking and narrow logics; but I always ended up smiling, wanting to go for a walk with the moon; and at the end of my days, my ego shot a bit, I saw that my stupid smiles lighted up the whole earth. Vanity, vanity … and I thought, whatever, whatever! Let your secrets out. Let your inner radiance shine. Let your self help yourself. Let my flames be lost over the hill.

That my secret is partially unearthed is for the nourishment of plants; my mystery is all the less deeper for being partially unearthed, but those three quarters of me are dispersed to the globe, and bore fruit – I dreamed a dream. It burns in me like fire. For this I have given up on my jobs; I dreamed I was a young man dreaming upon the floor of his third-floor apartment that he was himself an old man, same himself likewise and that a litter of grandchildren were running about the house. Bothering him with noise … under the floor are his daughters-in-law, all eager to please him, to take to his floor his favorite dishes … an old man likes eating. I dreamed this dream: that the apartment I lived in now would be bought from me head to toe, and three generations would live in the three stories with me as the father-head, ruling justly, lazily, and being the butt of jokes, but sharp-eared, selectively deaf, with back pain … an old man wise to the end of his days, but very, very lazy. Consider the leafboy standing upon the ripples of a wave, the wave sending out more waves out of itself, fastening there, far over a stone rock that ripples apart which he studies constantly and which to him appears large as a diseased giant’s snout; he after much trial and travail upon the constant inconstant rhythm of the waves, his suffering his disturbances and his poor human relations, his psyche in turmoil and mis-relation, has the insight at last that the stone is causing the flow of the water to come up and ripple his boat; but this does no good; he prays constantly for some child to intercede and simply take away the stone, and he studies each ripple so significantly that he understands each one of his problems as a problem of pure logic and diagnostic; and yet all he must take away is the stone, which seems to him so big. What is the old man saying? What am I even saying? I have always been a simpleton, not very smart. To the trial fastened to the point of the sugaring waves, this person standing there forms a whole theory of his problems and a model of prediction; that is because his feet must maintain upon the problems of life; and yet, as like a genius writer, far greater than me, who can never figure out life and whose greatest works come as permanent guilt and unforgiving of their own shadow because they broke off an engagement, exactly opposite of this person I simply have no stone in my flow, thus have a less interesting life, and the one who has all these problems will be far greater than me, and the system that he draws to study the ripples and nipple-crest of his wave will be greater than mine, and yet I have no stone because I have a loved one; simple as that, stupid is as stupid does; simpleton is as simpleton thinks, I shall be forgiven for having no interesting thoughts, no ways of saying from this perspective it can be thought this way, from another perspective it can be thought otherwise; stupid is as stupid does—my God, I’m stupid! But the stupid always forgive.

8.20.2021