WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.

There is my desert.

Edmond Jabes

Arvo Part

Not able to find his favorite swimming hole Heraclitus

eats the lunch he's packed in the parking lot and reasons

"there must be a better way to proceed than this."

Later

Anaxogoras slurs into his ear: "Heracli, listen,

don't you see

everything is made of everything, but the object it is has most of that,"

and Heraclitus thinks

"avert from my tongue the madness of such men";

he thinks

"if i could get a few more dollars

I could get those forty acres

and grow my olives in peace."

from Presocratic Blues by Joel Bettridge

Capri Batterie by Joseph Beuys

Film still from Quo Vadis

Asphodels

Funny, that gnostic

on the fourth floor

is still awake.

He knocks and knocks

on the heating pipe.

The mob in front of the window

has gone, and now

on top of everything its starting to snow.

In the whole city

no shoe-laces are to be had.

The machine-gun fire where the banks are

has subsided

But in the fridge there are

a couple of asphodels

just in case.

from Kiosk by Hans Magnus Enzenberger

APPROACHABLE

the one-

winged soaring blackbird,

above the firewall, behind

Paris, up there,

in the

poem

from Force of Light by Paul Celan