I'm relishing Cole Swensen's new book. Here is a first array of favourite passages:
The first walk: the first line: that so alone am I who loved so is walking
always walking toward. I saw myself in shards. The drift that drives
the eye into time.
*
Any walk Rousseau once said is endless where the wild might seem
to have a name undone from within the unanswered flaw written out
by hand.
*
This I who ran adrift. Should it rain. Begin again. The rain.
Kept me in all morning among my hands.
*
You can see me there wandering, ecstatic
in the green of it, the grove of it, the mind.
Distilled the soul is always found alone in the clearing of a grove.
And shivers in a crowd.
*
I fell today as I walked I was talking to myself it was something I said
that broke the air and kept on breaking it down into smaller
and smaller pieces.
*
"In walking is the forgetting of the world" dissolved of body, small
in timing, sharp in lightning, and full of such abandon, hand in hand,
the heart rains from within, I think, the found, once trusted, veers.
from 'Rousseau: The Reveries of a Solitary Walker'
10:15, and a man is walking his cat. Unlikely, I know. He knows it, too. But it looks like an established routine. Man goes one way. Cat stays at corner; man comes back, making here-here noises; cat goes the other way; man follows. The street is calm.
end of 'A Walk on May 17'
And was
neither heard nor herded, although I sensed the gathering forces trying to
gather up the indeterminate group of all things headed forward. I will sort them.
end of first 'Wordsworth'
For whom there was no difference, to walk simply was to write
and vice-versa. Rhythm as a mode of sight
from second 'Wordsworth'