Tell the abstractionist what you want her to tell you, but it’s a bad idea to tell her good friends break up over ideas.
She’s your good friend and she’s helpless.
She’s been sorrowfully awed by your inability to draw and your resistance to both abstractions and medications when the bodily world is insufficient.
The earth hangs and the abstractionist hangs on to it.
Her life and her thinking are twins and it’s the nature of their twinhood to compete and to love each other terribly, to need each other endlessly.
1
Like these hours before dinner if she’s not drinking, the air between them is visible. She wants to sleep without deciding to, without going to. Her desire becomes the fuel for invention or the layer of sympathy she lies over everything or a state of permanent agitation that she’s come to consider what life really is. She thinks sometimes she is the happiest girl.
2
Hills blend with the indoor reflections, then diminish, then are replaced by the doors like the passing clouds the color of fog. It doesn’t matter if she rushes or meanders within her ten foot square. The color of the boy dripping by the pool is white. The monkeys of North Adams, are they mad or mystical?
The text says sunny, but the picture shows rain.
Up, down, despair, big feet: we might be strangers talking, walking down a county road, finding cash on the road.
Plenty of water beats on the snow, crusting it deeply with your boots and my boots.
Our snowshoes break through one out of four steps.
The swings between perspectives are more manageable than the weight of it all at once.
Everything comes out in the face before it goes away.
The mood is a wealthy invalid.
The day ends with a maroon landscape splatter.
We have bread, whisky, and trout from the hidden lake for breakfast.
We are serenaded by the cattle bells and more snow coming down.
Three degree morning dream jays hang like rags in every tree.
Is it rain or deportation?
Now in the thawing, sentences make judgments we want less and less to make.
We take our time, fold it in half and then half again.
Birds want to mate and nest the way we want to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee, but we can’t.
There is no word for the window through a window.
LESLE LEWIS