Autobiography of Red

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

Desire is no light thing.

What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.

Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.

Under the seams runs the pain.

He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.

A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.

They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.

When they made love Geryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles' back as it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own, running both hands all the way down from the base of the neck to the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain.

Depression is one of the unknown modes of being. There are no words for a world without a self, seen with impersonal clarity. All language can register is the slow return to oblivion we call health when imagination automatically recolors the landscape and habit blurs perception and language takes up its routine flourishes.

How does distance look?" is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved.

Then a miracle occurred in the form of a plate of sandwiches. Geryon took three and buried his mouth in a delicious block of white bread filled with tomatoes and butter and salt. He thought about how delicious it was, how he liked slippery foods, how slipperiness can be of different kinds. I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside.

Not touching but joined in astonishment as two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh.

There is no person without a world.

Small, red, and upright he waited, gripping his new bookbag tight in one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other, while the first snows of winter floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silenced all trace of the world.

Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.

You doubt God? Well more to the point I credit God with the good sense to doubt me. What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us? For an instant God suspends assent and poof! we disappear.

...there it was one of those moments that is the opposite of blindness.

...And tonight—Geryon? You okay? Yes fine, I'm listening. Tonight—? Why do you have your jacket over your head? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Can't hear you Geryon. The jacket shifted. Geryon peered out. I said sometimes I need a little privacy.

I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it.

…..in that blurred state between awake and asleep when too many intake valves are open in the soul. Like the terrestial crust of the earth which is proportionately 10 times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul is a miracle of mutual pressures. Millions of kilograms of force pounding up from earth’s core on the inside to meet the cold air of the world and stop as we do, just in time.

A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.

And now time is rushing towards them   where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces,   night at their back.

Geryon was a monster everything about him was red

Four of the roses were on fire. They stood up straight and pure on the stalk, gripping the dark like prophets and howling colossal intimacies from the back of their fused throats. - XXVII. MITWELT

It was the hour when snow goes blue and streetlights come on and a hare may pause on the tree line as still as a word in a book.

Are there many little boys who think they are a Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the Dog they were sitting on the bluffs The dog regarded him Joyfully

He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.

She stumbled then and Geryon caught her other arm, it was like a handful of autumn. He felt huge and wrong. When is it polite to let go someone’s arm after you grab it?

He had a respect for facts maybe this was one.

Outside, the natural world was enjoying a moment of total strength.

...some hours later they were down at the railroad tracks standing close together by the switch lights. The huge night moved overhead scattering drops of itself.