2. Octopus teeth in a ring and elongated tentacles: things have their center and their branches—ideas of first buds and then the elderly tops falling back because of night frost, frog debris, wind and too much rain at the petals. She influenced us, the amazing student. God! knowledge like that of what is first, last, of offshoots and where and what the pith is and is going to be.

3. A mind tracing beginnings beneath the branches, so seeing the cervical gap from liver pressure and urine tricklets, estrogen florets, and watching the fetus dwarfing back to fragilely gripping the wall, and moist enterings lucid at the tip. Maybe compare that to goals met from intellection after you installed shimmers in the objects you studied, deliberation from your first virtuous curiosity—for sure, a kind of birth.

4. France absorbed Joan’s program starting with herself in Domremy. Hello, center. I feel in June here sincerity considering His sun, on my face, that shall refract to cousins and farthest mobs, extend in a delta toward frayed men in Orleans and farther. The Colorado was rafted. Whales squeeze for stretches of air-block. Coast, falcon. Migrate, sand. What else should extend is mentioned in Live Gauges for Ten Thousand Scapes.

5. Traced out, extensions flourished—emotions imitating them. Maybe burnt green, one extension, a palm frond canting so that shade will rot a seed enough to drop down. Maybe sonorous, footed in a line by the whited, warped trim of the wharf, comorants sounding, extending out. Individual, our imaginations were sincere, real greens, real whites. Sincerity oozed tranquility. Maybe spans even of contaminated river, with mucus and eel warts, but opening and opening starting points and examples.

6. So extension from whatever is all: from mole-rat, King, or dust-mite, flaky growth, or you, or bear, protozoan on his claw.

7. The attention all times will almost depart us, splatter from a bough with reachers, doze, paddle seaward, flit, sag dangling from the top, probe (almost) for the center that wandered.

COMMENTARY I. 1. About King: “His charisma’s clear.”
                                                                                                        —Reporter

2. About Bach: “His ritornello woodwinds his Kyrie.”
                                                                                                       —Reviewer

3. About You: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”
                                                                                               —William James

4. —Said into space towards members of an ear. Deliberately! Deliberately word by the word for room for thought that rest liberates. Or else spun by eyesight into font on paper. Whichever, each an illustration of sweet attention, for whom who knows? until the meaning is likened in turn to some relevant thing, like a film or a paintable flower. Do you know Cat On A Hot Tin Roof or Simple Men? Have you watered the hyacinth?

5. Fine. And yet illustrations can be other than comparisons.

C.II. 1. What? fingering the rubber-band that way, illustrating anxiety. “This, here, who, how?” your forehead saying. And so we think your opposite is a squirrel’s calling mouth, a thing that hears the gauge it goes by, sincere, aware, and thus sincerely hearing.

2. “Whoever reflects on what passes in his own Mind, cannot miss it: and if he does not reflect, all the Words in the World, cannot make him have any notion of it.”
                                                                                                       —John Locke

3. It, perception, and others: are they as though of silt? Vague ways we’ve ridden, or fogged-over hypotheses stuck with terms? A perception, a hill-view together with bulbs of spill-spark, stuttering lights amid clouding mountains: the image of (for us) friendliness between us. And the meaning there perhaps very simple. Bulbs meeting glasses with bubbles, that image constellating with rain hitting all directions. It is the Fourth of July! But heard, all that, named, felt clumsy. We would do that until we found a gauge for it all, demystifying the meaning.

C. III. With a whacker gut the branches away and down, down there must be inhabitable, a world that (to be at all a world) must allow stuffing. One says, “I am the self inside myself.” But why, since things equally are inside, Durer’s paintings, geometry maybe, (what else?) and blue diary handwriting about a divorce, (what else?) Bertrand Russell’s caricature, canyons and deer in them we saw, (what else?) and the odor of cormorant and illustrations using mole-rats? You are of (not among) them, those, these, all this.

C. IV. VIDEO POKER 1. Bells of wired rows contaminating my version of heaven, loudly for winning hands, for nothing quietly, hefting lids of the eyes upon a straight or straight flush, Augustinic and Vivaldic rotations in spans of one bite... newest coins, fingers’ push, queen’s & king’s face, and departures thrice, past the fleck-sparrow’s nest on the sign, via dried drool pools atop keys of the bank machine.

2.   To do self-made tests!

3.   The elderly woman’s chest-sweat nudges through cotton, the bells tintinnabular to her more than a younger lover. To not play at all; rather, to watch others losing and winning as a self test!

4.   The low ceiling somehow not preventing this watching of myself from a pagoda, high up, imagined with dragons etched in the posts, and orange-bordered characters.

5.   These impromptu documentaries of ourselves, which we project onto foreign magnificent zones. FOUND: Basho doing it, translated as The Skinny Path to Oku:

C. V. 1. Days & moons are hikers though eternity, and the years passing are travelers of that sort too. Other wanderers: folks counting time on a boat or going by moments walking a horse home by the bit, those whose journey itself is home. Many from history fell dead right on the road. Yet I couldn’t repress wanderlust, drawn by pulled clouds, again & again me dawdling alone up the seacoast. So I swept cobwebs last fall inside the riverside hut and soon spring skies returned, mists floating, so I wanted Shirakawa Barrier as a traveling space, the spirit Dosojin’s voice unconcentrating me during every boring thing. Barely got through fixing my raggy pants, doctoring my rain & sun bamboo hat, the Matasushima moon rising to mind the instant I treated my sore shins with burnt moxa. Leaving for Sampu’s cottage I gave up my place,

2.                               family’s presence—
                                  old hut of mine: transformation
                                  into a doll’s house

3.   That part of a haiku chain left tacked by me on a post.

C. VI. 1. We eye-balled the road to Nambu, a wrinkle in the distance, and held over at Iwade, and rode then along Ogauro’s bank past sulfur hot-spring steam. Forward to the Shitomae Barrier without seeing other human travelers, only the guards keeping us almost from walking through: maybe we were hobos & assassins. Sun fallen behind the mountain when we trekked to the very top, where we slept in the open-air shelter, a watchman’s. A few variables there giving us suffering: three days of rain yelling in irritable winds:

2.                               the horse pissing!
                                  by the lice! &
                                  fleas! on my pillow.

C. VII. 1. MAKING THE THOUGHTS SINCERE means spying from a pagoda, hearing the morning with eardrums of night watch... Imagination like this will have to do: eye of six cavernous miles back, at least six, a poised eye surveying the underneath frowsy sienna lot, an arena; and a plash like dripping haunts the rotting boundary fence. But one panting jump out the shadows, a traffic of beings in constant fluorescence, cellular, observable beings. Thus a world. It will have to do.

2. It and the eye that knows it constitutes you; things have their center and their branches.

3. The extreme hypothesis of palm readers seem more accurate than “inside” and “outside” seem.

4. On the old trolley our raincoats touched and we noticed. So to inhabit a world and to watch it does not mean identifying with the afterlife of mosquitoes forced recumbent in amber.