Epilogue

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

~ Robert Lowell


Never thought writing could be such a battle. Time tears away every last pure motive and leaves the skid marks of desire in its wake. Black stains and empty space. But...

The boxes are back in the apartment. Will begin unpacking my books today. Hope to get connected to the internet later this week. Still have those notes to post. So many ideas, never enough energy or time. But this will change soon... It must if I'm to make it out of here alive.