from The Fatalist: Home whose names are produced by motion

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.