Yearbook (5.5)

It’s a old TV show, it’s totally awesome, about these college kids or whatever. Knocked my head on a rock. It’s the delicious, chewy baseball glove hamburger. This is not an optical illusion. I want a new city built to include—in this room the lights are out, the lights from outside move across the ceiling. You can spot and pause the moment it begins to be fear, the whale-isle, the murky treasure. Caught a bit of stark welkin at 5:30 this morning through the newly deplasticked window.

Yearbook (5.4)

Next day, found bright white oyster mushrooms on alder logs, filled a cough drop bag, then a ziplock bag. When I opened it it was all phrases like “rolltop dusk.” People on the bus qualify their statements as “potentially,” “relatively.” And willows including Sitka and another, maybe Scouler’s (glabrous twigs and leaves, except strigillose, maybe slightly reddish, undersides of young leaves; the leaves were small, smooth-margined and rounded) with leaf galls: large blobby soft lumps, just green inside, dark red on top, green underneath. Very rainy today. On those stump benches at the library someone had left a pair of green girl’s shoes, a chunk of bread, and a silk vest with the whole pantheon of Looney Tunes characters depicted on it. Ruinous rain, waking the tongue.

Yearbook (5.3)

Petals had fallen off a few. Let’s draw a comic together about this moment. Dreams from a beautiful magazine, all filtered by the grubby mind that frays what it touches and scribbles what it can’t. Transverse, longitudinal and tangential views of pine wood. Probably, probly, prolly. “We seem to be entering a world where there is no reproduction, where every act of transmission is also an act of interpretation.” He drew rainbows and imaginary bacteria on the rubber toes of his sneakers.

"There is something profoundly uneventful about a man-made lake, like the self-knowledge of a radical skeptic."

—Anne Carson, "Kinds of Water"

Yearbook (5.2)

Hesperis matronalis L.—damask violet. dame’s v., sweet rocket. Wish I was writing The Faerie Queene. The honest livings we pretend to make. Such an austere sentence dude. From the desert. On the beach there was a kind of invisible nettle/swarming insect/twanging harpstring creature that would deposit a clear resinous lacquer on the paper in your lap and sting you and bruise you and deafen you with vibrations. Beckoned, I walked towards it all day, because of billboard wisdom.

Perusing an Endnote

in John Livingston Lowes's The Road to Xanadu: a Study in the Ways of the Imagination, I learned that Samuel Taylor Coleridge rhymed his surname at various times with "whole ridge," "polar ridge," and "scholarage"! So how did he pronounce it? 

Yearbook (5.1)

I’m talking about radical, public misunderstanding. Serial monotheism (like “serial monogamy”). “As you advance, the trees gradually come out of the mist and take form before your eyes.”