Tuesday, July 15, 2014

mem card: "lines": 15 july



Doubts do not grow / branches and leaves. Why is that a Buddhist poem, Chris asks, the one that wanders through thought's foliage, not pausing to remark on the impossibility of narrative, the folly of grasping. My colleague asks me to look at the lines, not to honor them. These lines lose their branches and leaves like an odd island autumn, before the leaf-blowers & egrets come to fashion an end to story. I'm interested in what happens to context when it's shed, lodged beside other memory-sentences, when it asks you to re-imagine its slot in the machine. “How do you get down off an elephant?” Bryant's joke goes. “You don't, you get down off a duck.” The monk is a beggar away from his monastery. The man holding a cardboard sign, “Homeless Vet: God Bless,” turned his large eyes away when I reached the corner of Pali & Kamehameha highways. Sometimes, Pam writes, you cross the line.

                                                                 --15 July 2014

Note:
"Doubts": Dogen 
Photo by Radhika Webster Schultz

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