24. “Do you know anything about the patrolled green areas?”

 

I live near the cows and also some cowboys, also the patrolled green areas, also near, what we call for lack of a better word, the land.  My love of life, also.  And poems are the earth’s dreams; but for a moment forgettable, not quite deadly, leaked up, at night, from a fissure. And, as Raul Zarita tells us,  Purgatory began with his other cheek's laceration.  This is more agreement than anything, or rather, there is perfect sense.  It is a similar dereliction to know that none of the critical forms could help me with this:

Have you seen those infinite pastures extend themselves
where the cows fleeing disappear
reunited    weightless  before them? 

and

“Between poetry and love, we would not required the mediation of words.” 

***

Ortega Y Gasset said:

“Life is, in itself and forever, shipwreck. To be shipwrecked is not to drown. The poor human being, feeling himself sinking into the abyss, moves his arms to keep afloat. This movement of the arms which is his reaction against his own destruction, is culture — a swimming stroke.... But ten centuries of cultural continuity brings with it — among many advantages the great disadvantage that man believes himself safe, loses the feeling of shipwreck, and his culture proceeds to burden itself with parasitic and lymphatic matter. Some discontinuity must therefore intervene, in order that man may renew his feeling of peril, the substance of his life. All his life-saving equipment must fail, then his arms will once again move redeemingly.

Consciousness of shipwreck, being the truth of life, constitutes salvation. Hence I no longer believe in any ideas except the ideas of shipwrecked men.”

The cow, the stockyard, also.