WRITTEN TEMPLE

There is no order to the things he chooses to send you.  It’s possible to be living too fast for understanding but too slow for conversation, and so all he has to send you is the blur: descriptions of snow and ice, a list of chapter titles from the novel he’s reading, a blind woman’s attempts at normality, half a line from a spanish mystic, bits of writing where he’s almost there, sentences that are almost theoretical, almost map-like…  no discernible order at all.

A friend sends me this poem by Li Po:

WRITTEN ON A WALL AT SUMMIT-TOP TEMPLE
Staying the night at Summit-Top Temple
you can reach out and touch the stars.
I venture no more than a low whisper,
afraid I’ll wake the people of heaven.

… but he’s crossed out half the words, transforming it into the following:

WRITTEN ======================= TEMPLE
==============================
you can reach out and touch ======
================= a low whisper,
==== I’ll wake the people of heaven.

We are traveling too fast - or maybe too slow - for entire poems, entire songs, entire homes, entire relationships, and we know that there’s no such thing as entire people.  Not yet, anyway.  At least not in my world.  So we live what some people call the ‘homeless’ life, the ‘songless’ life, the ‘biographyless’ life.  But actually its not like that at all.  Its not like that.  I’ll probably never say it more accurately than ‘its not like that’.