Here I sit in Camelot
Sher having drunk alot
And really sloshed is how I feel
Cuz rose-ay is the real deal which really rimes w/ onion peel.

Massive are the beams that sway
and undergird my new sashay
and due to them I list and stray
Into the headache of a brand new day lying in bed w/ Doris Day

Or at least someone who looked like her
When on Hallows' Eve I looked at her
Accross a wine-dark dance floor
Upon which the wretched poor were bouncing to Justin Timberlake

Which I see is not a proper rime
But at this point in thyme
I really need to watch a movie
and I got Rushmore from Netflix today and she looks real good.

The end.

Matt, Leah, Twins, Fontanelle, Cigarette, Elbow

On the lam from Colonial America, the MLA and Lisa, Matt

found himself in a room with somebody's maps and forgotten lines and Leah.

Sound-fade: contented sigh over shot of shrieking twins—

the boy, Gabriel, slams his fontanelle

on my kitchen floor. Matt heads for a cigarette,

through spilled formula and fresh blood and an elbow.

And whose, you will ask, is the elbow?

If you figure it out, please tell Matt.

Having finished his cigarette,

he’s back, all smiles, hails Leah,

who is still dabbing a near-ruptured fontanelle,

still comforting her begrimed and roaring twins.

And without comfort herself. I thought they were twins

when first I met them—Leah bending an elbow

with the booziest of our boypoet friends, tendril fontanelles

and spinning bonnets blooming on her rosebud lips, as Matt

looked besottedly up at her, his only Leah,

his second chance, and lit his umpteenth cigarette.

I woke in the morning to a desolation of stubbed cigarettes

and couples and friends tumbled like twins

in the womb of their headachey dreams. And Leah

made breakfast and then, steering me by the elbow

to a room where sat the man himself, said that Matt

had grown unrecognizably dark. Ah, such a fontanelle

is fragile hope, and love is a fontanelle—

so exposed while growing together—or again it's a cigarette,

newly lit and soon stubbed out. And Matt

sat dark with having stubbed Lisa. How shame twins

love, how love and burden entwine and hang heavy from your elbow.

He and I nodded and looked across at Leah:

girlishly blond, astute and womanly-wise Leah,

who knew Milton and knew what a fontanelle

was already, and could tell her ass from her elbow

in matters of love, and was not adverse to cigarettes

or good Guiness, and was willing to bear Matt twins.

She smiled like clear water, and we looked back across at Matt.

Back in the kitchen, my admiring gaze holds Matt and Leah,

the stout twins and their fucking fontanelles.

Matt lights a cigarette, and I pick at my elbow.

"We die of too much life."

This is an actual memory, I think. It seems completely real, anyway. I am looking over the side of my father's small motor boat. His gold(-painted) watch sinks away from me into the water, crystal face up and fish-tailing its shoulders deeper with each clear moment. The watch is the only thing that catches light and the only thing that marks distance into the great light-and-depths-swallowing, eddying greenblueclear of the ocean. It falls for much longer than I would have thought possible, marking off seconds of depth, bearing sunlight, oddly clear and still in the way it occupies its receding. As if seeing is not, after all, a function of distance but a function of light and focus. I reach farther over the side of the boat, into the water, and trouble the surface with my fingers, because something about this seeing has become too much.

There is this incredulous moment just after you cut yourself and just before the cut begins to well up with blood, or just after you've misjudged the roadway and just before you collide with the guardrail, when the always-present, neatly chatty potential for (at least minor) disaster hangs dumbly open. And the natural desire is to try to reknit the clean slice of the sudden aberration by not believing that what has just happened has really just happened. That it's now good and finally and irrevocably done: become what they call "a fact". This moment when fear and regret and hope and resignation and total attention find themselves, for a moment, having exactly the same thought. This moment is so deliciously vivid that almost no one would revisit it ever again if they could help it. And almost everyone longs for it in spite of themselves, at least a little bit.

Last night I hardly slept, and when I was sleeping I was actually turning certain images from Moby-Dick over and over in the upper waters of my mind, at that depth where things are beginning to get dark but where slender receding illumination is so oddly vivid. I kept having this image of an enormous dark whale rising soundlessly towards me out of the blackness of the ocean. And in the dream I was terrified and totally absorbed. But I kept thinking that the depths were not foreign to me and that it would be silly and maybe also dangerous to look away. And then I kept waking up and thinking of my dad's fake gold watch falling the other way. I thought something like this, only without words, but more as a feeling that I should do something about it: The ocean is unfathomably deep, its depth is composed of fathoms, no one of which--no dozen of which, no hundred of which?--resists the eye. The ocean would swallow your gaze if the mind didn't know to teach the eye the trick of iconic seeing: see not what cannot be understood; instead, see a flat black surface, see the image we have rehearsed.

There is something falling through the ocean, a gold becoming green and then blue and then the all-color, black. There is something rising out of the depths of the ocean, finding outline and light and then words, and--too quickly--polite words, rehearsed, inert words. But the place where they cross paths, you can see that place, and that's somehow where joy comes from. Joy would swallow your gaze.

K's Writing

K does high/low very well and this works because it mixes funniness with poignancy. You always laughweep because it's barely bearable tragedy.

Not Necessarily a Design Methodology

If you stand anyplace and block out the noise for a minute you can feel a sort of tug that suggests a best orientation, a best direction to face. And if you walk around with this kind of attention you will notice that some places and orientations are better than others. It is hard to explain why. There are some easy explanations of the social-evolutionary kind: we stand most comfortably with our backs to walls, facing open space, maybe responding to a survival instinct that co-evolved with our forward-facing vision; we enter dark enclosed places with some trepidation, maybe because apes who didn't didn't live long enough to sire our line. But why is a chair on a porch best oriented just so? I've noticed that if I pay attention closely I feel very small tugs right and left, up and down, sunward and shadeward, and that if I don't heed them I feel slightly off, maybe slightly misaligned, and this sense of wrongness grows until I feel agitated. And I've noticed that people tend to place themselves more or less predictably, given the chance. These subtle forces are not purely spatial, they are also social. If you're sitting on the porch oriented comfortably and a friend [or an enemy] comes out and sits down, near or far, the forces respond as a planet responds to the orbit of a moon. Everything, actually, has its own gravity. We sit with our back to the wall, but if the wall is plaster or wood or stone we notice a gravity that has qualities that are very hard to describe.

When I have the luxury of designing for myself, I try to take the most direct route to rightness, and this involves very detailed, complete, three-dimensional mental images of a place, to which I return over and over until everything feels right from every point in space. Then I take this mental image and transpose it to paper. Sometimes I have new clarity as I draw, but mostly the drawing is just a record of what is already clear in my mind. This process takes concentration in the form of disciplined day-dreaming, in which I mentally enact many daily activities inside my mental model: I walk down a passage with my hand dragging on the wall, I cook, I sit by a window, I reach for a book, etc. And as I do these things I make adjustments: I roughen the stone of the passage wall, I raise a table-top and thicken it, I lower a windowsill and move a stack of books onto it. As the image evolves and solidifies it becomes less and less conceptual, more and more tangible. Architectural ideas, no matter how dearly I hold them, tend to weaken, compromise, and dissemble. The house becomes an aggregate of many small local decisions based on what I can feel about their rightness. I loosen my grip and symmetries, symbolism, fashion, and all the other forms of conceptual prejudice tend to fall away, leaving an artifact that is in many ways accommodated to its site, the way worn shoes accommodate to the wearer's foot. These mental models are intensely dynamic. Every time I put something in a place, the place changes, and the object responds to the change that its initial presence precipitated. There is a kind of diminishing echo of influence between the place and the objects I place in it, and the echo finally dies in perfect accommodation between place and object. Following this metaphor, an object that is placed without regard for the site creates an undiminishing noise, and will always feel incongruent and wrong.

Everything in a place has its own gravity. Even small things can be set at odds with their place, as noticeable as a thorn. This is not to say that meticulous design and thematic integration create right places. In fact, the best places seem to be more or less provisional and hodgepodge and contingent. There are so many reasons we can love a thing that things that are supposedly unmatched can be beautiful together. I have a beautiful Japanese rectangular bonsai pot, glazed pale green, sitting on a very rough Burmese sideboard which sits in front of an almost chartreuse wall. This serendipitous arrangement seems about right, and I like it, but recently I set down an orange bag on the sideboard and noticed that the whole room seemed to have found a new center, as though these beautiful objects had been waiting for something. It's hard to come up with a social-evolutionary explanation for this. Maybe we primates love to see an orange fruit in the green canopy of a tree? So why don't I get the same sense or rightness when I place my orange highlighter on this green sticky note? No idea.

It is good to be right at the edge of what I have words for. The words like a wall at my back, and the open space of not knowing spread out before me.