Vision

Open Season for Vision, II

In New Mexico, she sd
open vision alla time.

In New Mexico the air so thin,
vision rarefied,
fists becoming fingers each morning,
asparagus in the eyes.

Things emblazoned into themselves,
everything still, purple-orange rock
spread like steppes across land.
Round hollowed sound of caves.

In New Mexico she sd,
everything all around to be seen,
air like dry ice.
You walk out into it.
You swallow the air like so.

In New Mexico
you become as pure as the air.

4.31.68
-Norm Moser

Beginning My Studies

Beginning my studies the first step pleas'd me so much,
The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of
motion,
The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,
The first step I say awed me and pleas'd me so much,
I have hardly gone and hardly wish'd to go any further,
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.

For the Love of Nature

"It doesn't matter what you say to a plant," he said. "You can just as well make up words; what's important is the feeling of liking it, and treating it as an equal."
-Don Juan, in Journey to Ixtlan by C. Castenada

Green Grass

"A child said, What is the grass? Fetching it to me
with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is,
any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful
green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer, designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may
see and remark, and say, Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the
vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic;
And it means, sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among the black folks as among the white;
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I
receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves."

Walt Whitman- Leaves of Grass

Rapture

"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experience on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive."
- Joseph Campbell, excerpt from "The Power of Myth"

This is just to say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.

-William Carlos Williams

Exactly.

"I think, therefore I am"
-Rene Descartes