Enhances

belief in the spiral, and the spiral. Both journey and journey's sleep, going and staying, saying and silence.

Reversal

What are the highways of America saying? Living can kill you. Tongues pulled out of our throats as we start to say something true, sound the unutterable, the not-yet, the next-step, little flame of can't-see. Speech in America, they say, is free. But tongues lie languishing or dried stiff and stony all over the continent. Birthright as deathright.

While wilderness, as ever, stands thundering and circular and mute. We can't get our minds

around it.

Retrieves

speech itself as wilderness.

Obsolesces, Displaces

mind as arrow.

Enhancement

Do you remember those endless philosophical conversations in youth, the kind that go on all night long, start off with a tense and defensive and drunken argument perhaps, tapering near dawn to mutual amazement and everyone laughs.

Reversal

We've had nothing but rain and rainstorms for days. Outrageous wind, backyards littered with torn and weeping branches. Today it's just still. There's going to be an insect hatch, I'm sure of it, like we've never seen. I am longing for the City to step up its campaign of poisons. We can't go outside with the mosquitoes so bad. So here come the sprayers, the trucks. We can't go outside, of course, because the sprays they use are poison. We can't go outside, and we seal up our houses utterly.

Retrieval

American media are saturated with death. I've always heard and read that this is so, but didn't fully realize how true it is until, this spring, I was nearly diagnosed with death. I swear to god: sit-coms, commercials, popular movies of course, magazines absolutely, and on and on. We are being massaged

by death, but it feels so good, it feels so right, why look up? Why interrupt the masterful masseuse? Oh my god it does feel nice.

Obsolescence

We are swimming like Ron Leibman and Sally Field in a sweet backwater stream in Norma Rae. Two people who want to change things, stop the pain in the pain factories. The moment is obsolete

as soon as I have written, "The moment is obsolete." As soon as I have thought it. Before I have thought it.

A city, I think, is a slag heap of vanished moments. America demands that Now stay still. The demand goes on and on and on. We buy we buy we buy. Talk talk talk. Drive drive drive. An immense unceasing concrete O!

as we try to fathom gone.