Hello sweet love, I feel so much better today - 100 percent - which to the truly fit, might be something like 85 percent. I took a vigorous walk this morning, along the country roads here, that I suppose I experience & witness deeply as I tread - but now thinking back on it - it's all an inconsequential blur. What did I see? The gray creek, small shiny pockets of ice melting. A mallard on the water, that I wouldn't have spotted except that it quacked. The rabbit, deceased on the road the other day - gone. I didn't manage a workout today - why press it - but I do have an awfully pleasant afterglow at my crotch, even now, all these hours later, we had such a grand time in all sorts of settings, changed in the blink of an eye -- Whatever Works -- to make Brangelina seem like stay at homes. I spent a couple of hours at the library today, caught up on Golden Globe red carpet fashion photos. Some couples look together, like they're happy together, at least for that moment - others not. George Clooney and whoever his date was - they looked happy. Brangelina - their body English seemed very split, disconnected to me, as did that of Banderas & Griffith. But who knows. I read into things, or things speak to me. Not quite analytical, it's more visceral, intuitive - but the impressions are swift, sudden, pretty inexorable. Certain page-hit communiques are just that way, such as this morning, a title of an old post of mine, "In My Own Mind," an allusion to a Lyle Lovett song title. And I don't even know if the hit was from you - but I immediately took it to be, and felt that you were communicating that whatever's going on in the "facticities" of your life -- in certain senses you're apart from it - of it to be sure, due to not only responsibilities & obligations, but also genuine & longstanding love, care, concern -- but also that you -- a certain, core, essential aspect of you -- are -- or is (this sentence is becoming syntactically derailed) "In My Own Mind." I feel that I get it. Also, that that particularly eloquent page-hit might have been in response to something I'd written yesterday, how I might not be quite such a homebody if I had other emotional satisfactions. And here I am typing to you... And I think of you with your traveling, all that traveling -- possibly less than I imagine, because on a daily basis, since I don't know better, you always seem to be taking off or landing, though there was that long stint in Korea -- before I even knew it was you.

I had a nice email exchange with My Friend in Finland - he'd sent me a couple of thoughtful, delightful messages in recent days, and I finally organized myself, at the library, to write him back. He's someone I've never met, am unlikely ever to meet, which actually is fine. And yet we can sort of plug into, if not a shared, then slightly overlapping dreamscape of shared perceptions, inspirations, muses...

I read a piece the other day, an interview with a guy who used to live across the street from me, the whole while we lived on Sackett Street -- the perennial tedious question, posed by (who else but?) The Economist [via], about - paraphrasing - why poetry when it doesn't pay? To which the respondent eloquently responded, touchingly & meaningfully, despite not so much the inanity as the utter cluelessness (right brain v. left brain stuff) of the question.

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To me, these days, there's hardly anything more crucial than -- not so much poetry per se, but an openness, awareness, porousness to be open to all the phenomena unspooled before us at any given moment (I say this as a person who isn't visually blind). There's a danger - sometimes - of becoming just a bit too narrowly focused on single decontextualized minutiae - a single leaf, for example, as viewed against a white ground.

But when I think of all the richness just absolutely constantly abundantly about me, there for my noticing, even if in passing - even if not in noting...

I think of - for example - on my drive back from the library, on this seasonably cold January day, that by late afternoon had turned pewter & dark -- no snow on the ground -- and yet the quality of light seemed almost to compensate for that -- seemed almost to insist on monochrome

and on a long straight stretch of the rural county route -- the left-hand side, past & future cornfields for the most part --- on the right, houses, and a pasture, fenced -- and at the corner, on the other side of a gate, stood the most beautiful roan (is that the word I want?) horse, a single mysterious creature, all reddish-brown, gentle & magnificent, as I flew past, and murmured 'oh how beautiful,' while at the same time, as usual, thinking, 'darn I should have brought my camera.' (The Great Brain Divide - right there!)

Darling -- so - here I am -- in my own mind -- meeting - in between all sorts of gates & paddocks - yours