Slow. I’m thinking about ‘rate’ as it relates to ‘scale’ in my summer sloth mind. I can’t be fooled anymore, it’s the work, en masque, half-hidden in the staccato hills of here, cut by rivers and creeks, the lush outer surface of limestone cave systems through the edges of the one last summery, tently whirl before the city studio.

I got afraid to open the laptop, as sometimes happens, the same kind of afraid as going into a dark garage, or reading someone else’s letter.

Peter Green from the open-doored inside, the evening porch call and response frog chorus of seeking and finding gets louder as the night darkens. I have witnessed the entire progression of the afternoon from the table, reading, thank gods, more Marquez than since a long time. the ceaseless, elegant overflow of asides of Borgesian possibilities, dismissed like abundance, like love that’s too much trouble. One about a doll that Fermina received that grew! but unlike all the other gifts was not sent by her constant admirer.  Marquez shuttles the reader back and forth through this never-solved mystery that questions the writer’s ability to know who dunnit. That he would write how the girl learned to smoke the backwards way with the glowing tip inside the mouth. These puzzling asides are elaborate, opaque ways around the curse my own language lives under.

Where was I going to be pushing, rolling the work, the effort, and the how of the taskliness, what am I creating, and now I remember.  into a love thing, because that’s the exercise.  Exercise, practice, what to do while waiting in breathless ecstasy for the Real Universe to please stand up.  I have it swept mostly together in near-weightless dunes in the breeze of the ceiling fan, gossamer and only one measured unit into the material, at the absolute peak of summer, not one golden or red leaf in the humid, this-kind-of-woods heavy August, buzzing with life in the generous rain, the very eddy of endless fever dream on this buzzing green summer porch rails that frame  trees and water, soil, rocks and reflection, as a moving geometry.  ‘Смотрй!’ Malevich bellows, pointing with an everlasting, ghostly cigar, ‘Look! смотрй! how I make you think it across time and space. Because it mooooves.’

And so it is that Machine falls on the knife for me, again, batteries run out. I listen to the rain, and the faint crackling 30’s radio shows, an hallucination of the very same impending deafness that just barely doesn’t allow me to hear it, murmuring behind the not so silent night.

Create the world you love, not the one you fear.

That’s the message of summer.  I lose the writing for losing the reading, like infinity mirrors and look back for good parts slipping away from my fingertips, it’s like the self, really ?  the self, find it, fetch, locate the sufferer, isn’t it only the idea of suffering?  Only the idea of a life anyone else besides the self could even glimpse, given the roaring, ineffable difference between what is meant and what is said. Except for the professional sayers, like Shakespeare, and Marquez, who write several layers and stir, with the little weaknesses of man, into maddening enigmas of desire that end with everyone even the writer disappeared. except the reader.