"Y tú apareces en mi ventana, suave y pequeña, con alas blancas..."

Pieris rapae, male. As if it manifested directly out of the energy of my unseasonable butterfly-hunger, or out of the vibration-field stitched through the many lepidopterical books that I'd left piled around the desk by the window against whose panes it was so suddenly flittering. Its tiny delicate abdomen, thickly furred, its hindwing undersides shot through with the pierid's special greenish-yellow cast. Irreducible. What cabbage brought you here, into this house, into the room I grew up in, in February? Where did your larval self live? Chant me your lines, how many generations of milky flight from Québec 1860 to here & now?

Vanessa atalanta

Last year it was almost the whole season before I saw a red admirable, even though I'd been down in the Crimea those couple deep summer weeks among the long-tailed skippers, hackberry emperors, common snouts, gulf fritillaries, etc., and the Gallonses had gotten to see that one in Central Park. I was walking in Zeke's orchard, late fall, with Pavel Durgeyevich: he was the one noticed it and called me over. It sat for us a long time on the gloss of a toothy apple leaf which bobbed lightly with the afternoon's breathing. The blue patch was pretty much faded out, but what a lovely creature! I had no film with me; nevertheless the color-saturation comes easily to me now even against today's wintry palette, fat bright apple-skins punctured by the stubbly green gold at our feet like that moment in Emily Dickinson.

Ong textbook:

"Lack of verifiable context is what makes writing normally so much more agonizing an activity than oral presentation to a real audience. The writer's audience is always a fiction. The writer must set up a role in which absent and often unknown readers can cast themselves. Even in writing to a close friend I have to fictionalize a mood for [him], to which [he] is expected to conform. The reader must also fictionalize the writer. When my friend reads my letter, I may be in an entirely different frame of mind from when I wrote it. Indeed, I may very well be dead. For a text to convey its message, it does not matter whether the author is dead or alive. Most books extant today were written by persons now dead. Spoken utterance comes only from the living."

Wa mā adrāka mā l-Lulu? That vital shakti which Wm. Blake called Orc, what makes the heart run, lets its holes work, lets the whales surface & breathe inside my chest which is almost hers, almost hers: identity happens, I become tidal desire without object, gas footlights grab & catch at the hems of me – all flames, like Emma Livry! A woman lives her full soul's size and the man-worlds around her topple like cardhouses, damning. Almost she routs the evil even from the Ripper's own heart but the poison letter of maleness arrives, enfin, as the letter always arrives. «Male journey» comme on dit. Must this letter always arrive? It musn't; with your help, héros, with your ashes and answers, I begin to rip the Jack from my own root. Jack, Mack: stiff, flip-flopping lozenge of green barred with black. Le couteau sur la table disparaît au cours du repas.

Wa mā adrāka mā l-Lady Lazarus? Death finds its way into a body's life like psychology into the jīva but my heart sometimes blinds its fingers' tips down a run of big jade or smoky-quartz beads all the way to a darkness so big it equals all of space and brings calm as it's clear it can't ever end: and the beads were words, we find, when the lamp gets its wick lit & the glass chimney's set. Words made into pomes. Hard linguage-forms exceed the page, strange fruit in excess of her mouth and mine. Slang & psychology mix, promiscuous, with simple sublimity of space in the uneven rise of the lines, my dory good and wet, its seams all proven, off beautiful Nauset. Elle est partie, elle est là.

Wa mā adrāka mā l-Sassafras? Bright insensible steel of the kettle at purr on the meetinghouse stove, quaker-light invading the space like vodka. Sunday morning always resists being kept outside with the dogs and the ducks. I wonder if you understood the way I felt about the stove, an Atlantic, cast at a forge in Portland (556) half a century ago. I remember slipping you a note rolled tight round a heavy little bottle, launching the surplus of me otherward, into the meshes of the Symbolic Order, from my island. Mon naufrage. The streaming light from the window snags its beams against a hip of the kettle, forming a little pucker of emptiness. I stare into this clear glare-knot and it's a tear, a hole, a puncture in the colored field of forms filling the jewel-organs of my sight: stove, pipe, steam, painted & unpainted wood – behind all this rich ecstatic maya-tissue lies a pure spatiality of empty light et ça c'est toi, c'est Toi.

SANJURO

We were all thirty, like Sylvia Plath. Clouds had been scudding across the squinting eye of each of our hearts ever since we could remember. That they began to clear off, that a sky was found to be behind them, seemed less important at the time than that we were suffering suddenly beyond precedent.