Everything

Not fruit but the moment before fruit. Not thought but the moment before thought.

The entire body poured into almost thinking it. What

  was it I was so here for. I thought, everything is a castle. Maybe before

was not the preparation but just being here. Just being here’s intensity. The relation,

if any, between long sleeves and the pleats in them being

  only fierce loveliness, the sense that, for anything folded there is, constitutively,

more to come. More folds, or the unfolding that is folding’s. Passion.

Does this make sense? Being here. Being

  here. Being here. Being surrounded by experiments. Someone, downstairs, stunned

by the cold dishes. Wanting to sleep on them from the inside. I read the biography of Paula Modersohn-Becker, the dead German painter, and in the book she wasn’t alive

but the biography kept restoring to her a wash

  of beforeness, befornessing. The sense of at least one thing yet to come,

which is not the same as life, I know, but maybe more important. For why I need her here. Repetition

is memory in the present, ritual is perfect non-forgetting. Never again will I want memory but a memory that at each instant

  is always already used up in pleasure, what if

I said this and you understood anyways. Yes you can be dead, yes

you can’t be reborn, yes something will happen, you can’t be so changeable and not yet be changed.