(no subject)

[proximoception]

We admire the stillness of rocks at times. But almost everything is like that. Look around you at the things in your room. If you stopped moving, would any of them move? A few weeks after you yourself some number might be taken away. But wherever they went, there they'd sit - and mostly sit forever. The trees and grass out your window stir a bit, but just at the tips. And fewer at once than our motion-glued senses credit. The animals sleep or wait or watch or digest. We too find ways to rest, to stand about, to stay. The world's hair may slightly blow about in the single wind that's its air - a wind thus barely astir at all - but from where we sit the thing itself nearly never has moved. And no one's sitting anywhere else. This is it. This is the show. To think about it properly is to hardly think at all. But we don't think properly. More than anything else we are we're landslides. Our bodies may stop for breaks but the particles we ripple through still slosh about inside them. Every skull's a cocktail glass of sand. Set down so fast some wobble for a hundred fifteen years, which rocks say isn't very long at all. Or would if they bothered to speak, which they never have.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

This is great.

Two quotations. The pebble that "screams in an ecstasy of being."

And "they are round and ready." Which Bloom took such pleasure in tasting as he read it out in class.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Redefining silence as noise is interesting, and maybe kind of necessary to feel just how much silence we're talking about. Likewise with the ecstasy. Not writing doesn't do the unwriteable justice - the least unacceptable version of it can only exist within writing. More or less like how a negative's the next best thing when you can't find a photo.

Google didn't know the second one.

A.R. Ammons

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Upland

Certain presuppositions are altered
by height: the inversion to
sky-well a peak
in a desert makes: the welling

from clouds down the boulder fountains:
it is always a
surprise out west there—
the blue ranges loose and aglide

with heat and then come close
on slopes leaning up into green:
a number of other phenomena might
be summoned—

take the Alleghenies for example,
some quality in the air
of summit stones lying free and loose
out among the shrub trees: every

exigency seems prepared for that might
roll, bound, or give flight
to stone: that is, the stones are
pepared: they are round and ready.

RE: A.R. Ammons

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Odd I forgot that. Fantastic poem - "and then come close / on slopes leaning up into green" esp. amazing.

Re: A.R. Ammons

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

It's where he sounds least like (my) Ammons and most like you. #Apophrades