It was a standard dandelion, with northwest light and northeast shadows. The Carolina russet spectacular. The hours spent adjusting the memories of the last few hours. Freedom from junk mail. A free spirit with otherworldy debt. You weren’t in a realm that tendered too much bandwidth. I think of you semi-autonomous with guitar squeals echoing through the sugar maples. You have a home now. There is a child. How we got here is to circumvent the obelisk of uncertainty. I’ve been looking out at the same landscape for years. For me the sublime was a pool of reason steaming with lust. When I think of the current American landscape I’m not sure why I envision the light of a vanity mirror reaching across the room to a bed of solipsists. I’ve been trying for years to say something right about the circumstance where you work to construct an edifice and find yourself unable to part with the scaffolding. I don’t know. Maybe you know.
There are literally millions of stones to choose from so now which do you throw into the river. I’m not reporting on Zen. I’m not a moonchild smoking by a national fountain. When you say, “I’m the shape, and you’re the shadow,” I picture the future as something you see, in a foggy field, a dark structure you walk towards but never arrive. Like the foregone sanctity of finding ourselves on the other side of creation, generating forbidden arts in a wooded space, a space that is now challenged. Writing background music for ads portraying missing identities; you embody a question mark dripping with blood, but in a good way.
We met serving prepared foods. This is a fairly rank superstition, but when you slept with your dog on my floor one night in July I thought that our problems were refreshing. When I came home from work the next afternoon, in a thin monument-shaped spot of sun, was a gathering of plump ticks on the rug. Thanks. I smoked Haze and marveled at their obsidian bodies, they were together wondering what to do next. If this is life, call it life. From the most west to the most east. The struggle has been against the covetousness of commercial interests and that has best been answered with a word; that is Tuskha.
[Eric Amling, Kings County, 2015]
