SALINA---EOLI
I'm not feeling well and it's going to rain in an hour. The white wall is striking the sea, or the other way around, and the islands beyond look smaller than my urn (which in reality is much smaller than the islands). The flowers in it are tiny under the sky and bent to watch the sea. My head is pounding. Everything is smaller until you're up close to it (my love who is the air ,undiluted;
When you come to me, I am the birds which are gone to the winds. I am green tea eyes in the overcast morning cool roaring ocean Silence, my love who is the air, against whom I am covered with this white sheet. (This is a specific memory.) I am sorry; I am searching. You are just a memory, a frayed ribbon in my journal written in a constructed language. Or did that belong to someone I saw on the beach, writing? It's a funny time of year that brings these memories. Sometimes I can't remember which one I am (in the transcripts). In the evening, we watch the boats.
I woke up last night with an idea for a geodesic kite design. When I die, I want to be a kite. There is no greater zen than to float in the sky. All terrestrial action is a sublimation of our desire to cruise free through the void. Down here everything we do is a copy. Deja vu is an illusion, and most of the time we can't even see the duplication. We are oblivious thieves.
On the island the birds break fast on the merlons, bowing to the sun as it warms the far side of the horizon, preparing the land for daytime. Or is it evening? The birds dining together separately before returning to their roosts under the edges of the stone walls. One flies suddenly. Everywhere the sky. They still measure time and temperature in the old system. Up in that sky I once saw infinite peace and stillness, and it is not something you can find by looking. It comes back as the sound of a flag flapping slowly. It tempts me as a scribe's last tome left sitting in the candlelit tower at night. When I open it, the pages are blank.
You can hear everything if you turn off the music and Sit. We are capable of killing ourselves, slowly and by habits. We are more powerful than we know. Imagine walking down a dim streetlit city street, stone wall to your right (across the road) and train tracks at the top. The train comes in (soft high whine at first, sound of a cushion of air) thundering and echoing off the buildings (clack clack) and every other sound is gone (clack clack) and then slowly quiet returns and you are standing still on the road in the wake of lethal raw power and mundanity. It's insane.