Against clarity (poem in praise of dirty windows)

 

Some bottles are not about the message, but a quality of light. 

Late afternoon :: December :: a dusty window :: a small dark room :: the pleasures of the camera's lens. 

On such a day, glass isn't what you see through, so much as what you see with: what throws the light back into your eyes.  

Be grateful then for dirty windows, for golden light, for winter :: that horizon of the present through which we cannot see.

Notes

Why write in praise of dirty windows? Because we are approaching the end of the year; consequently, from every media source, we are subjected to an unbearable stream of reviews, resolutions and prognostications.  Unlike reviews designed to help you learn from your mistakes, or real efforts to imagine another morrow, these lists of happenings and events to come are disingenuous, and anything but illuminating. They simply take up space, gagging the airwaves. Here's what I would prefer in these dark days: here and there, a spot of real light, something surprisingly lovely, one small thing, then another: never another list.

Correspondance (act again alice)

act again alice although always another anything art between body certain
character come course does else even everything experience first form
gertrude get give go going great having hemingway herself however kind
know let life little lives living look looking love makes making may mean
might must nothing now object often others own painting part people perhaps
picasso place play point portrait question quite rather read reading really
relation right say see seems sense simply sister something sort space
stein story take tell things think three time toklas two understand upon
want woman women words work world writes writing yes

Notes
"Correspondance (act again alice)" is a found poem, generated by a word counting and assessment program that Amazon.com ran through my book, Passtionate Collaborations: Learning to Live with Gertrude Stein, in 2007. The words here are the 100 most frequently used words in a book that consists of 118,844 words distributed into 5,093 sentences.  The program also suggests that the book weighs in at 5,093 words per ounce, useful perhaps if you want to know what the cost of posting it might be. Would it sink if you put it in a bottle and sent it out to sea?  I don't know. Perhaps.

Photos are of a message in a bottle that washed up on our shore two years after it had been dropped in the water of of the shore of PEI. Some messages do arrive--somewhere.