All the Fierce Tethers

And going down to the hardware store, I was thinking how much I really liked that—just walking, being in the sun, alone. Just being in the sun alone. You know? How nice that is? How you can feel that’s the whole reason to live. And it’s enough.

How accustomed I am to being emplaced. To fashioning a place in words.

The crape myrtle was, as he says of his tree, “no play of my imagination, no aspect of a mood”—and then, yes, “it confronts me bodily.” Certain modes of apprehending, seeing, or contemplating (the taxonomizing of forms, for example), aren’t wrong, Buber says—just not necessary, in order to be in relation to a tree.

In the steepness, I was unshimmed, root-cut, all pith. The tree sealed itself up with—what? Solitude? A presence so insistently here, it was ungrazed, unsnared, stripped clean

Just, there it was.

And what filled that very long moment unfolding?

a letter’s a space where presence extends.

What’s the word for an elegy that mourns a thing it never knew?

My tallow candle, its buttery crackle.

Cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a poetic, but merely a chemic process. It will soon be forgotten, in these days of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the Indian fashion. The stove not only took up room … but it concealed the fire, and I felt as if I had lost a companion.”

It’s always been the habit of conquering imaginations to call a place empty, and build there.

Spots that look bare at first—stretch of back, upper arm—are, if you slow your looking way down, sites of endless microscenes: angles thrown by sudden flexing, shadows cast by turning and bending, folds lit by sweat, outcrops catching wind.