Elan that lifts me above the clouds into pure space, timeless, yea eternal Breath transmuted into words Transmuted back to breath in one hundred two hundred years nearly Immortal, Sappho's 26 centuries of cadenced breathing - beyond time, clocks, empires, bodies, cars, chariots, rocket ships skyscrapers, Nation empires brass walls, polished marble, Inca Artwork of the mind - but where's it come from? Inspiration? The muses drawing breath for you? God? Nah, don't believe it, you'll get entangled in Heaven or Hell - Guilt power, that makes the heart beat wake all night flooding mind with space, echoing through future cities, Megalopolis or Cretan village, Zeus' birth cave Lassithi Plains - Otsego County farmhouse, Kansas front porch? Buddha's a help, promises ordinary mind no nirvana - coffee, alcohol, cocaine, mushrooms, marijuana, laughing gas? Nope, too heavy for this lightness lifts the brain into blue sky at May dawn when birds start singing on East 12th street - Where does it come from, where does it go forever?
I am not a painter, I am a poet. Why? I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg is starting a painting. I drop in. "Sit down and have a drink" he says. I drink; we drink. I look up. "You have SARDINES in it." "Yes, it needed something there." "Oh." I go and the days go by and I drop in again. The painting is going on, and I go, and the days go by. I drop in. The painting is finished. "Where's SARDINES?" All that's left is just letters, "It was too much," Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of a color: orange. I write a line about orange. Pretty soon it is a whole page of words, not lines. Then another page. There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life. Days go by. It is even in prose, I am a real poet. My poem is finished and I haven't mentioned orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.
Glory falls around us as we sob a dirge of desolation on the Cross and hatred is the ballast of the rock which his upon our necks and underfoot. We have woven robes of silk and clothed our nakedness with tapestry. From crawling on this murky planet's floor we soar beyond the birds and through the clouds and edge our waays from hate and blind despair and bring horror to our brothers, and to our sisters cheer. We grow despite the horror that we feed upon our own tomorrow. We grow.