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Excerpts from “In Pieces”

Tone Deep

 

No sound is less than a sound or more. But music keeps us from hearing each one by itself. Says John Cage. It is a pity. No mother tongue unless a mother. Or many books demanding we enter their superb monotony. What tongue would not allow us to say you in the deep sense, intimate? Years of melancholy, errors in pronunciation. Something in the middle slows down. So many times a day I do not speak any language.

 

 

 

Sunset Theory

 

To feel an idea is difficult. And rare. A private fluency of figment and frontier. A splinter in the sky. Let’s not get sentimantic. The word “reality” is a word. Atoms are unpredictable, a warp in a continuous field, a gamble against the powers of disorder. But grammar can unpack a sentence it has taken you so long to understate. What open window? What thin but penetrating light?