Lyn Hejinian

Time is filled with beginners. You are right. Now each of them is working on something and it matters. The large increments of life must not go by unrecognized. That’s why my mother’s own mother-in-law was often bawdy. “MEATBALLS!” she would shout superbly anticipating site-specific specificity in the future of poetry. Will this work? The long moment is addressed to the material world’s “systems and embodiments” for study for sentience and for history. Materiality, after all, is about being a geologist or biologist, bread dough rising while four boys on skateboards attempt to fly, spinning to a halt micromillimeters before I watch them, my attention riveted on getting tangled and forgetting the name of the chair, for example and the huge young man, he is covered with tattoos I think. Life is a series of given situations of which the living have to take note on site and the storytellers give an account as the wind tangles the rain or the invaders take over the transmitter. The exchange of ideas constitutes a challenge to the lyric ego. And so I am reporting that I was wrong. A real storyteller never asks what story one wants to hear, not the happy Joel nor the sleepy Clara nor the dreamy Jane, the seductive Sam, the sullen Robbie Jones. Nonetheless I have bought a bicycle. I have to remember to stop. Thank you. I hope you will enjoy it. A bike that is simply locked but freestanding will be immediately stolen. Of course there can’t be much wrong in helping people get what they want but creeps and purveyors of negativity and cruelty are tucked into every institution and most corners and though my inclination is to vote in favor of everyone’s dearest dreams of advancement I disagree with the remark that “deathlessness” and “fearlessness” don’t work. I think they do. “Deathlessness” immediately invokes the “breathlessness” we thought we’d half heard in the panting of deathlessness whose dashing is life. “Writhing” is self-indulgent however but the near-rhyme with “writing” is terrific. Don’t change that. Poetry can’t be about flight — that would make flight a perching instead of a flight. When one thing becomes another the other is free to become something else. I remember just where we were sitting under the influence of the wind watching a crow becoming something else in this case a crow. The state of milk in jars takes place and the state of world affairs can now change. No cereal manufacturer intentionally includes angels but marshmallow bits may look angelic in a bowl. Who knows? A poem full of ruptures could be one from which all kinds of things are flying.

The best words get said frequently—they are like fertile pips. Apples fall heavily to the ground and lie in the sun, their scent abandoning them as a philosophy which cannot be further perfected. Love releases playful sensations even from serious things providing a life to think about. Take R—the only thing R could credit herself with was having lived her life and so she not only kept an account of it but did so not in the privacy of a diary but in the form of letters —abundant, profligate, indiscrete—that I want to write to you so as to note something that I read this morning: “It’s not that this or that means something to me but this!—or that!— means something to me.” Musically R bequeaths herself to posterity as a scholar might bequeath his or her library blowing twisted veils of rain past the narrow and curving windows in the last hour that will carry us along to the time when those who come after us will learn what we know—a man with a mustache waxed and dyed green, a line of tall people and a woman at the door, a committee of children without scooters but not mournful, a poet with a motive, a pilot with a flashlight, a sulking but fascinated scholar, and Goethe no doubt for whom R would have released a flock of red canaries.

Home whose names are produced by motion is where people go (one following the next as she hums to herself or he hums to himself at some risk to all) to stay in a family plot the tales of which are spinning like blades on a pinwheel wafted by my desire to talk to you. Fate and desire, chance and intention, from time to time converge. Most people want things to be good but taking a programmatic approach to getting it would be despicable and none of it would ever get to you except via a raucous garage sale. The owner of the pharmacy at this very moment is screaming in jubilation at a silver toaster, I want it even if it doesn’t work! Two firemen have broken down mid-sentence and gone out to look, you know the ones. The purport comes all at once at the end in such a way that one is thrown back to the poem again to carry out the ”again“ that the poem is about. I’ll get a library card at last and I won’t pay $100 for it feeling tired but only as tired as one would normally feel at sea level after, say, a five hour hike, and it was the same when it was just getting light—a murky gray that never brightened. I don’t know you well enough to break away from my conversations in order to barge in on yours and give the illusion that I often know where I’m going or where I want to go with certainty of motive to propel the prose or some version of certainty of my own, not knowing where one is going but going anyway. Perhaps the trip will be purposeless. Destiny is simply a good excuse for experience. There are birds chirping, smoke is rising from kerosene-splattered barbecue briquettes, it is summer and now, humiliated (I am so damned naive sometimes), swinging the hips to the right to avoid the edge of the worktable, then to the left to avoid toppling the cactus I shout, “Things! Things! Get out of my way!” I’ve never lost my capacity for being angry. I feel that it is justified, even necessary, though I admit that after the first hour my improvisations contribute nothing but motion to the composition.

Come October, it’s the lake not the border that has been redrawn. Thinking about the event afterwards, I realize how remarkably well-prepared the girls are. There don’t seem to be any slouches among them. Please tell them I say hello and that we’ll need 14 for the green salad and 14 for the apple tarts between with some rapid washing in clear water I remember as play and planning in childhood, preparing until the very last moment for a gripping narrative that was itself perpetually given over to improvisations and asymmetrical collaborations that could run for days. That makes another 14. It was ”the word“ or “the world” in 1981 when we undertook to talk about the phrase “once in a while” once in a while noting the vagueness then named “a while” and how “once” the phrase recurs and therefore means more than once the “while” is defined. We too are in “a while” and when “once” next occurs, if the basic design suits you, we will need a bit of modestly biographical contextualization for November. I’m going to put some thought to something implausibly contemporary which perhaps isn’t wise since between then and now no new coincidences have been noted just one large color photograph of bespangled cowgirls herding heavy bulls up the avenue that opens this week carefully wearing baby blue boots to take out the garbage but it never rained. At the end of the month, Halloween should be clear.

I am writing now in preconceptions Those of sex and ropes Many frantic cruelties occur to the flesh of the imagination And the imagination does have flesh to destroy And the flesh has imagination to sever The mouth is just a body filled with imagination Can you imagine its contents The dripping into a bucket And its acts The ellipses and chaining apart The feather The observer The imagination, bare, has nothing to confirm it There's just the singing of the birds The sounds of the natural scream A strange example The imagination wishes to be embraced by freedom It is laid bare in order to be desired But the imagination must keep track of the flesh responding—its increments of awareness—a slow progression It must be beautiful and it can't be free -for John Zorn, after his “Elegy”

constant change figures the time we sense passing on its effect surpassing things we've known before since memory of many things is called experience but what of what we call nature's picture surpassing things we call since memory we call nature's picture surpassing things we've known before constant change figures experience passing on its effect but what of what constant change figures since memory of many things is called the time we sense called nature's picture but what of what in the time we sense surpassing things we've known before passing on its effect is experience

But isn’t midnight intermittent Or was that just a whispered nine A snap of blown light low against the flank of a cow A likeness of something numberless that only I not knowing the sound might know It may have been howled by a circling dog being chastised — threatened — by multiples of itself in pursuit of the consolation of knowing that everything is real It was real I don’t mean midnight — despite horizon, nipple, and fissure I don’t mean And yet I do — mean, I mean A cowering animal woven real flickers please pull over Kierkegaard Kierkegaard says knowledge precedes every act but surely there are acts that are not preceded by knowledge. Repetitions pass at the door from summer to winter. Some slowly. Some quickly. Total strangers. Never saw them before. Can’t picture them now. Umbrellas — strange totalities — upheld, wheeling.