notes toward a shakespearean vacation

Dear Other:

i a s t o h a "t" & o m o t "s". iastohtcat, ttwm/mnMfuaa. it; hus; bSinefS. ibas, y, omj, omt. nevertheless. d, let's go out raging together, give me something to cut through the grease of this. Deliver me from the parish of nodding heads & bobbing criticism; don't let them look at me like that, all that accusation. I don't want to talk today. If we empty love of meaning & Shakespeare of love, where are we then o darling? Deliver me into the sweet purgatory, your refinery steel after our empire has risen up--let there be less

sterility in the world--but if thought were cleaner, less linty, less plaguey, we'd need much less our oversanitation, our thin slices of thought deveined, uprooted, reeking of antiseptic & formaldehyde. Science should be our salvation.

Is there really a problem with negative definition? All of our descriptions are too weak & life too varied for our nouns & paltry adjectives. Even to the edge of doom--let us exemplify our way toward apocalypse, the revolution of the Romantic imagination. It will rise. (a: ycdwwadwtwIi, dg: we're having some issues with clarity.) Immanence, not definition--sacrament of language--bears it out--exemplification&practice. (p, ftlog, p, SRY. watonmbrto&oa--r, taithsf absurdity. If language exemplifies let it do so but you can't not use definition just because the poem resists it.)

Let us not be emptied of meaning--we are extension but we are not against science. Let us hold some meaning for ourselves away, for Shakespeare's great faith & love for words. If we can't believe in Shakespeare, who can we believe in? You learned how to question but then you couldn't stop--not believing only takes you so far--Shakespeare is our priest of language:

if he can't trust his words, we cannot speak or think to speak at all. It's all in how you spin it, & Shakespeare's our master of spin, our spinner of meaning, our unfailing Arachne with the battle-cry of Athena riding up loud behind him, breaking long not on but over him, sweeping wide into the future. Here still even we are drenched with it: the attempt to get out from under is an impossibility, o slinger of inappropriate terms; no gunslinger, not of impeccable personal smoothness--no--you have been described: a plain, unassorted white citizen. If we don't have the words it doesn't matter. That hasn't ever been the point.

We are wedded to our language, & he is our arbiter, our priest, our bearer of sacrament. I'll take that. Not ashes in the mouth.

He's our trickster, our half-god of jokes in deadly earnest. True minds together--a difficulty yes to find. Our hands were firmely cimented. How do we share perspectives, behind other eyes pure illusion--how necessary? & love that renders us inanimate sepulchrall statues--for what have we outside the body? (you can't look in on one-way eyes) Let us not refine ourselves out of existence, pure spirit. Leave your dream-visions, the myth of a dialogue of one o longer after the perfect dramatic scenario o looker after a dissolution of the self--

we'll never lose place & please be pleased: we have no simile without place, no imagination without concrete. We have a problem with it but o when it's good it's gorgeous. Body is text. Land is text. Read the soul in the hills of us, our land, our high desert of the self, us together on a straightline due east highway--we are from the west already

o yes i am your pioneer your mining town girl with sunset in my hair & salt rimed on my spurs on the last seashore of your manifest destiny

& the compass said "east" & we went

up into the desert, through the ghost towns & the diner coffee & the neon light of a Salt Lake evening--there's another city too in which we pure place became, drivers together

watching telly in another cheap motel, sex& cigarettes on the windiest of nights in the town that gave you name--& all the kids there gathered around their cars, all that nothing

to do--epidemic of the small town. They are the same everywhere in our America--yes, our land of promise, our sweet&abiding nationality. Sympathy is nervous: it is involuntary. Nerves taken over: galvanic--no--just living, more akin to the electric fluid descending, that glance of God in the moment before--

this shall be our consecrated house, our theatre, our sacred space in the antiphony of call&response, our voices together calling out.