There has to be a part of nonpossession
that’s still relation. There has to be a purity without closedness.
Purity, almost

without consciousness, loneliness, a pure
energy, pure
person, I hope to sustain always an energy that’s very pure.

Three increasing complex lines in a column. They all curve slightly down on the left side and slightly up on the right.

I had spent a year trying to write only in long lines. I had
thought,

I will write a Lucie Brock-Broido line but even longer. I will write a poem
obsessed
with sleep. Duration. Then

I read a book by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. I realized
what I was writing was a Mei-mei Berssenbrugge line.
When
things like this happen I
know why I’m writing. Theory

of mesh. I came back

to New York. There was a collection of Rachel
Kushner’s essays in every bookstore. In each one,

with S, I read her essay on Duras. Things happened to Duras,
Kushner writes, “that she never
experienced.” The story of Duras and the older Chinese lover was
  a legend

                       which, having ripened during her whole life, finally

         came true in The Lover. Her best book. Which means she had
to write

it until it felt like experience. As,
            I think, does Kushner. In her novels, with

                                             her life, in her own way. It’s why I love her
                        essay. It’s why her essay
         is familiar like the road home with

someone suddenly new. I was visiting H’s place in Queens and their
roommate C told us

      about Leonora Carrington. In C’s print of
         And Then We Saw the Daughter of the
Minotaur, who

is the Minotaur’s daughter, C asks us. I think
  it’s the dancer
  the dogs see, I love the dogs. C says the Minotaur’s daughter is

everything we see after the painting. Maybe. That much. Looking
away is everything. Maybe. At the center

   of looking away, being gone

  is everything. Leonora H. Kushner. Mei-mei

C. Duras. It was true: I didn’t come here to not fall in love. Writes Kushner
  of New York. In
the mesh who is she talking to. In a dream

my family photos were taped onto photos
of the distant star and then, as the dream

reached its point of inflection, I realized the star could see us
through our backsides, and,

somehow, you were part of it, you were part of the dream, then part of
the star, part
of the seeing,

by being the one outside it, the one element

of waking. In her note at the end
of Empathy, Berssenbrugge wrote—I was living alone

in northern New Mexico. Wrote—I met Georgia
O’Keeffe, Agnes Martin. Wrote—I wanted to feminize
scientific language

and philosophic language. Wrote—The slow arc

of the sun across “empty” land
became long, poetic lines.
Friendship

as a way of life.

And then we saw the daughter of the Minotaur.

The key to all the work up to this point.

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