Lines Found in Montgomery Woods, December 31, 2010

What was
What was between you and me
What wasn’t
What wasn’t between you and me
What is what isn’t
Between me and you

The abstraction
The memory
Of what we were
And were not

Identities of questionable province
With or without papers
Histrionics tears love
Laughter
[…]

Yes officer I assure you
That’s her
How do you know?
Her voice
And who are you?
Why don’t you ask her?

These trees the whole time
Before then until we’re both gone
Whoever it is we are
Or are not
Fire logging new erosions
New destruction, yet here
With or without
Clinical diagnosis
Before Columbus
And here after everyone we know

Dissociative

Hyper associative

Never the same
When we touch
Who we are who we were

This shape the water makes
Made by which water?
Liquid fingerprint
By whom made this pattern
Identity

Individual?

What you want
What I want
Expanses
Framed conceptually
Fed back pruned
Elaborated into minimalist projects

Much of the year the ground is dry
The rest in flood

This says nothing
There’s much to be said
As the air chills
And my fingers shake
There’s nothing to say

Does this redwood before me
Speak so slowly
It sounds like my own mind?

If this water touched nothing
Yet flowed in this shape
What sound would it make?

(This poem was written in Montgomery Woods, Mendocino County, California, U.S.A. and immediately recorded to video at the same location: