Dear Nada,

           "Failure/Failure," Ray Johnson quipped, then 67
leapt into Sag Harbor Cove, 1/13/95, $1700 in his wallet
to backstroke 50 feet, drown. His mail-art
a ceaseless flux, but
equal to the divine da Vinci
notoriously unable to finish his works? Peal of thunder
& five black birds just dropped past the window
it's raining out. "Chen
                          __   __
                          __   __
                          _____

                         movement    perilousness    thunder"

There's no reason for living, no reward
for having lived, like nothing
even happened. I tell you this because, well, here we are
living. What next? Probably I shouldn't look up
probably I shouldn't get up
& look out the window, I'd be there
over the edge, a moment's lack of vigilance. But
that's just idiotic, come on. Keats wrote
"The Eve of St. Agnes" in mid-January, & this is no dream.

Ailean wrote that vultures were thought to be
an entirely female species. Freud
believed da Vinci, fatherless, wove this
into fantasy. It's 6:26 a.m., Monday, January 18
in Tokyo, where you'll wake
& not tend to your dying plants, or are they
dead already, I think you told me they're already dead.

I open J.H. Prynne's Not-You. "Truthfulness-by-silence is
is truthfulness, and expectation thereof is 
expectation of truthfulness; but
expectation of truthfulness-by-silence is
not yet trust." So what? I love you as I love few mortals
I close J.H. Prynne's Not-You, open something else.
"Soundless moving is not endlessness."

Now it's dusk, looks bleak, until I realize I'm seeing
lights flickering dirty yellow, orange
blue-green & red, some actually a crisp white 
smeared through the window deliciously streaked w/rain
It's a great pleasure to see things, to look up
from some book & see the blueish-grey silhouette of a bell tower
smokestacks, leafless branches, wind hurtling bottles
I realize I don't see but hear clattering down the sidewalk
along with the voices of children, tires through water
& in the brief period of time it takes to focus
attention back to seeing from hearing, the sky grows dark.
Clouds now invisible in the furious storm.

"More than meets the eye meets the ear," how ironic
I just read that in some book (_The Martyrology_)
It's raining too hard to go out, though
earlier friends invited me to dinner & drinks
I have to get out of this room, this mental space
Chris admonishes me for reading so much
It's too late to call you & beg you to sing to me
I'm becoming claustrophobic, wanna throw something

         "  __   __
             _____
             __   __     K'an   a pit   of danger

             _____
             __   __
             __   __     Ken    arresting progress"

Fuck the I-Ching. Anyway, it wasn't thrown
but bibliomanced, same book, 
The Martyrology.
                   "The superior man knows where to stand
in the pull of things."
                        I don't like that word "superior."
Nor that it's necessarily a man,

                                 love,

                                 Gary