Through the tip of this pen, snaking round its nautical thimble, blooms a rose. Red, of course. It's magic invites wings that will slowly close, breathing without haste, in no rush to join the rainbow. In no search for the copper-green shimmer refracting a fly's wing.

Through the window speaks a breeze scarcely amused by static electricity. Raise up the lightning rod, get a move on! Don't clog the aisles.

Ah, the pattern flickers. It's thin on specifics, to be sure. The pulsing butterfly, lilting off its petal, flutters down a shadowed creek. In the vast analysis it could be a winnowed memory . . .

youth is beauty, beauty youth

that is all we know, nor need to know

form is emptiness, emptiness form

it cannot be known

all is true

in the dimension of love

Having simmered ~

. . . from road rage, to terrorism, to someone skipping place in line, to not saying 'yowsir', to mass murders, to singing the wrong song, to a clotch-headed fellow worker, to a racial slur, to a protest, to draining the swamp, to foul weather, to pandemic pandemonium, to the price of gas, to using gas, to floods, to oceans gagging on plastic, to drought relief drying up, to history, to history being rewritten, to polar ice melting, to shorelines receding, to shaved heads, to receding hair, tattoos, sunburns, the price of eggs, all overdue ~

Spontaneous rage crops up everywhere.

Put with deceptive clarity, it's a pile of discarded rags eventually bursting into murder.

What the analysis lacks in precision, it abounds in recognition which, at least, is a review of the facts. It's not your well oiled grandfather clock, or a credit card skimmer, the sumptuous repast of Greek tragedy laid out on a platter like a severed head. Qualify it with a moan, bemoan the ship's mast bending in the wind, but beware the jabber wockey. The truth, forsooth, is not a loss of flavor on your bedpost overnight.

Our backyard squirrel will vouch for it, dips his paw in the bird's water dish, his seal of approval, clapping and barking. I'd say it vies with the NBC Nightly News, on high.

Something there is to be said for the kitchen fly that returned to the screen door to be let back out. It's all the buzz. Bringing memories of a soothing rhythm, somewhere buried in the gravel, where the mill race glints. The myth unhurried has made it thus far, as a willow, Spanish moss stringing down in languid tendrils. In days of dust to dust, not so long ago, before snoozing into feet of clay, leaving just sand down there, treading through glops of a steam whistle some ways up the lazy hazy river. The ineffable manages to squiggle through the house of mirrors, leaving tracks of silence. And the moss, specially commissioned for transmission by our humble bee, who is trading honey from flower to flower. ~

Herein lies the myth.

Taking that thimble realm as an example; in it is all that can be had of space. It annoys to say this, so obvious.

Various visions endow a bowler hat, flipped upside down, with space. Or the confines of an International Space play station. Or bubbles effervescent rising in a lemon Coke, the distance galaxy to galaxy when not beset by a black hole. Wherever you pause to look, it all comes out the same. The space-time of relativity is an empty intuition, translucent, even though a good deal of thought has been burnt over how it warps.

How a jar is made deforms its capacity. The simplicity of this is its depth. Without attributes, space remains void.

Possibilities such as the number of beans that will fill it depend on a concept. Each bean occupies just so much as will fit the presumption, not more, not less. Why do just so many beans of a given size fill the jar? Is it how the jar is made? It is how many, once the possibilities have been decided, we think it can hold?

Space is the stepchild of thought.

All is true.







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