Certain Principles Must Be Observed (audio only)
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noctes illustratas
(the night has houses)
and the shadow of the fabulous
broken into handfuls--these
can be placed at regular intervals,
candles
walking down streets at times eclipsed by trees.
Certain cells, it's said, can generate light on their own.
There are organisms that could fit on the head of a pin
and light entire rooms.
Throughout the Middle Ages, you could hire a man
on any corner with a torch to light you home
were lamps made of horn
and from above a2004
as if a road could be otherwise but geometry
defies the man who is lost on the road that
the trees want to reach and reach down
to his walking on
along a verticality that defies
the requirements of normative perspective
and so he will reach, and the trees against chalk—
the gesture of the arm extended is central
to all Soutine’s work be it a branch or an ache
or a split of the face, going off. In this case
can you say that a man is lost just because
you cannot distinguish him from the background.
2016
In the essay “A Winter Walk,” which predated the more famous essay “Walking”
by a few years, Thoreau paid particular attention to the astonishing array of whites
from fog to snow to frost to the crystals growing outward on threads of light. The
fact that white is separately known. That it is its own wildness, entirely exterior,
like all weather you notice is a version of an open room coming through
2014