Mood:
quizzicalTopic: Bartram's Boat
Dear William,
It may have been John. It might have been. A man looked at me today and said the title had a grammatical error, that further was a verb and that farther was what should have been. I didn't say it, but it was also what might have been. The man was older and after. Mostly after, as having asked personal questions relating to professional knowledge and a bevy of suggestions about his own wisdom, i.e. experiences as a listener and literati. What can you say to such folk, who are performing something so poorly it is hard to maintain eye contact? Like a weak animal, like a weak animal broken by years of being observed. Just like that.
You describe young alligators running alongside your boat, comparing their colors to the rattlesnake, which I find to be a dumb name, a medallion that can do little good in my pocket or anyone else's. Simply, you were responding to the yellow. Yes, I know that feeling, though it's not the feeling of being in the canoe by the yellow. It is the feeling of being on protected land and having a leather belt, some pebbles, and a feeling that you can draw them in close enough to see the yellow.
It was May. When were you writing? My brother was beside me, actually engaged with what was going on. One time the road was plugged up with a family riding together in a truck. The rocks were slipping out from under them, it was one of those mountain road scenes, where doors are swinging open and everything looks like a wild shopping cart in traffic. That was how it looked. It was grey, meaning the evening was just setting in and the fishermen were behind us, in white figments, partially reposed from my description by campers that interruped the bay by blocking out the horizontal pilaster.
That family was before me, even though there was someone else in my vehicle. I felt as if I were alone and that the family was aiming something at me, driving that slowly on the road, we had that relationship, where I was bringing something up to them, bringing it up continuously without being pushy . They kept smiling at me, and this suggested to me that somebody knew, somebody knew where I was and how much I liked simply driving on that road. I wasn't hurrying home to fix supper or put someone's fear at ease. I was right where I wanted to be, when the sun was setting. I was right there around something dubbed Shoveler, and the little canals. Those are really popular this time of year, those little canals. They see a lot of traffic. When you think of certain animals establishing themselves in water, having an actual place setting in that element, a territory, the size of which has no easy formula, which makes me think that getting off easy depends on the ability of your spatial sense to deflect light, to deflect it and keep part of your own setting, just so as no one knows exactly the dimensions of the berth you require.
That berth for some people might be signaled as handball or a set of glass walls that simply lead into where you are going. A menu with certain words on it that might not be available elsewhere. Trusting that there are words that still hinge on availability and how I have made those words available to myself.
Even a job that provides access to a new set of words, such as pinch point, halidom. Familiar with the landgraves. A family of them. The line down, the line down the road and the line of clothes. The idea of a ranch being set up and upsetting the homeowners.
Sometimes you see signs telling you that you are doing it. These signs are informational and specific. They all tell you who you are. They are red and they provide names without any prodding. They say violator and they mean you. They mean you. I am the only one I know. I am the only one I know like this and that is of necessity. Subtitled length or heighth of foliage , someone asked the reason for it being there and so a subtitle is provided. Canning the appearance of a tree, canning the epistemology of wooden structures, dating aside, listing aside and to the side.
Ground upon. Water, for the water. Music box, shells and the door. Shells and the door, water upon the door and the grass behind. Sound of a frame, sound of the grass as the frame to the water, the branches whiffing, the branches whiffing, or over, interchangeable, with the shell. Point, bringing to point, bringing to point and from that observing the water, observing the water. Inhaling aside, teetering upon the brink, teetering upon the brink, teetering upon the brink was the thing brought to me, the thing brought to me was lipped.
Looking over the brown and the less brown meeting. The brown and the less brown and the trees that lack obedience.
Sorry, William, I forgot you were there. You should have said something. No, not anything more about plants. Tell me about the alligators and what they looked like in their masses and how shallow the water was and what sort of noises. The dimensions of the nest are also of interest.
You know the hunters used to hang them at the dock for the measurements. I can't believe I never got a picture. I was young. They would hang them up, and the bulls' genitalia would loll out and their tails would make afterthoughts of them. One set upon ice.
___________________________
When someone dies that way, the way I watch the footage. I am looking very closely at that footage. There is a fairytale that emerges, an enchantment whose use is immediately pronounced. Leisure behind it, always leisure. A sense of the hour comes up, a sense of the hour behind the circumstances, being the primary circumstance, hardly an explanation, more exposition, the same exposition, over and over, a kind of unmerited time.
What often is missing is not supervision but the effect of supervision upon the person. Belief in the transfer from subject to object, that delivery, believe in that, believe in the enticements of that delivery and how it is arrived at simultaneously with outside impulses or coincidences, which ever, which hold nothing. Quite literally emptying the outside impulses to make sure there is nothing to them. In the sense of time, something about chronology actually snapping, after the idea of a vegetable with its unabsorbed water leaking out, with the idea of that water stimulating the finger. That is the same sense as that time which loses its vein and devolves into an object situation. The object and the hour, and how the hour comes to break the object, to return status. It is an hour. It is nothing else.
