prose-poem

It pleases him how Spell is how the word is made but also, in the hands of the magician, how the world is changed. One letter separates Word from World, and that letter is like the number one, or an 'I', or a shaft of light between almost closed curtains. There is an old letter called a thorn, which jags and tears at the throat as it's uttered. Later he learns that Grammar and Glamour share the same deeper root, which is further magic, and there can be neither magic without that root, nor plant. He's lost in it like Chid in Child, or God reversed into Dog. Somewhere inside him is a colon. A sentence can last for life.

Have trembled beneath the pressure of a light beam.

The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others _ who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O__ara, is something people with courage can do without.To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals with one__ failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There__ the glass you broke in anger, there__ the hurt on X__ face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

Now is History as fast as the mind remembers.

from the prose poem "The Universe Thrums on regardless" in my book SPAN.We are almost nothing in the night. Reduced to warm blobs and the sound of breathing. There is comfort in that.