From: Spiritual Letters

For an end, a constant ending: images from a life counterpoised with imageless reflections. Smoke rises, spreads over roofs. In the room a sparrow huddles against the wall, near books and china. We discuss the transcendent and the satirical, and find ourselves wondering: a novel? The sheets of paper blacken. Burning animals amongst burning trees haunted the child. You cannot get from A to B by walking a line from one to the other. The girl's eyes habituated to begging touch your lips, burning them. Memory's blasted. He'll keep a record of the epiphany in his breast pocket, if not sewn into the lining of his coat.

(Series 1, #1)

 

The woman has entered through the doorway, a metal cup in her hand; her face, through the thin veil, is that of someone still very young and unwilling to believe in her beauty. A caption reads "Sacraments" and pertains to the act of blessing taking place in the foreground. In front of the underground station a little girl pisses in the gutter, while her mother holds her hand. You leap high in the air; the leap is held through categories of pain. Bruises and welts beneath your clothing. Nights when there has been no one you would call to your aid. I remember a taxi-cab ride at night in a downpour, when someone got into the cab beside you and all sense of protection failed. The predicament: as if having fallen into it, I found I could do nothing at all. A silence that harms; an absence of writing that calls for an outpouring.

(Series 1, #2)

 

...letter by letter. Having no wish to be detained by clever fabrications, stories that might distract. A dark courtyard, a lecture on aesthetics. - And if art is only lies, for the sake of rapture and power? Facing the wall, away from the wind, she struck a match for her cigarette - the flame drawing my look. Feckless, volatile girl; in the dream she began shouting at me as I turned away from her. - Flung across the hospital room by the Holy Ghost, the musician said. A phone-call: the driver survived; he died - the friend I'd stopped seeing. I thought of how he'd insisted on reading poem after poem to me at dinner; I'd looked (but not wanting to) at the spittle ejected upon his lip as he spoke the words. Faces of friends by my bed. Memory's unquenched: her long hair that she tossed around her neck; her hand that reached for mine. Eye toward eye.... Slow phleboclysis (drop by drop; into the vein).

(Series 1, #3)