The structure of love poetry is still very appealing for it’s ability to draw from so many far reaching disparate elements in attempting to illustrate a multifaceted impression of a single subject: the lover. ___'s poems are an inspiration in their freedom from conventions or tropes, but also because the images evoked betray a bold vulnerability that is so shockingly fragile that one is instantly led to assume an air of irony in their tone. With or without sarcasm there is an undeniable universal appeal to the love poem that contains a power like an ancient spell that should be studied further.

This house is huge even with so many people in it, but to leave it’s lofty caverns to inhale the sunlight of day and transverse the outer rim of the fjord to the far edge reduces the scale of this architecture very quickly. As I ascend up the slope of the valley the world of men and letters drops away – immediately from ear shot and slowly also from all peripheral sight – becoming a kind of memory even though, only moments before, I was shrouded in it’s mists. It’s always better to walk up than down; each step higher with the body, foot over rock, steps up the sheer threshold of time, seeming to propel the thoughts through physical platitudes, as though the nooosphere of Teilhard de Chardin were palpable, certainly not a visual encounter, but one which can be felt emanating from the atmosphere at increasing intensity as one propels away from the core of the earth. Many philosophes describe sensations of levity, emotional ascensions, or fleeting encounters with the ecstatic when faced with the sublimity of nature, and this certainly has much to do with a simply comprehended shift in scale from regulated urbanity to almost incomprehensible natural monstrosity, but I also believe that altitude is as much at play in extracting these emotional resonances. Following the narrow sheep paths along the grass-bearded stones one begins to pick up their tones vibrating up through the material underfoot. The plants grow up through the cracks, of course, but also up from the vibratory earth, skipping their expanding cellular stalks across the scrim of a vertical ocean of ecstatic flux. Talking to myself as I walk, yelling out to hear in the deafening silence, at other moments whispering in the intimacies of the nestling foliage, great inspirations are tripped over like invisible objects placed like trail markers at the high water line of the universe. Other motivations are destroyed, residues of calculated urbanity and mechanisms of civilization that have embedded their heavy metals into the hot oozing tissues of the mental scrim which flows a fluid fleshy flux around the indissoluble impediments like the glacial streams hurrying past the blood-clot stones of the valley, rolling them over in the icy hands to smooth off the edges into heavy purple calcifications like fossilized effervescence. These unnatural machines with their schematized skins and metonymic membranes are quickly made brittle by the gentle cooing of the clouds, leaving a cavity in the mind gums of cancerous vapors which must be expelled out to the valley breeze to be whisked away and drunk up by the savory sea. I pull out forgotten tools and carve new marks into my arms, turning one biscuit into many loafs, lapping up the morsels of clarity beaming out from the sun behind the purple mountain and shitting out the black greasy residues of city life in the tradition of the sheep whom I follow. The old tatters of past lives that I was clinging to so desperately are seen in the light of day as soiled bandages scabbed in to the wounds which they were intended to mend. I leave behind as much as possible and restrain my hands from fondling the cold stones for too long, I want to leave the mountain with less than what I arrived with, bury it up at the top to be forgotten by all. On the way down the air becomes slower, colder, stinging my proprioception like a freshly shaven chin, casting short flickering shadows along the crests of the waves down in the navel of the beast as the sun rolls around the far side of the peaks in a perpetual handshake with the formless condensation. Now lower, now lower still, my feet land upon ground made more stable by more feet trekking the same steps before me while the tendrils of my thought remain wrapped around the pink and orange lichen speckled monoliths drilling swords through spaceship earth like gargantuan pins in a plush cushion of moss and ever present dew. I return to the city and it’s noises and asphalt tinctures, I return to the house and it’s dirty clothes and throbbing radiators, I return to this goddamn screen with it’s radioactive hallucinations and imperceptible cancers. I need to sew up a fucking space suit with an umbilical conduit to the mountain peak. I need to invent a machine that destroys the mechanisms of progress instilled within me while maintaining the oh-so-human cavity without refilling it, just letting it sit and be vacant, a fleshy pore of nothingness maintaining a cooler glacial air inside the fuming gates of my city boy body.