a mamaist b-ing

it gets so you start worrying 
things would start falling
away from you, if their being
other than they are were to start getting 
more intense, but focusing
for a moment on feeling
the tension rising 
in you is a way, you realize, of not forgetting 
how one thing
as much as another thing
(or anything
else) can be a wellspring
of imagining
in which everything
--from what you're not seeing and hearing
to what you're not thinking and feeling--
can be a seeming plaything,
and if at times it's like hanging
by a shoestring
over the abyss's deepening, you keep from worrying
too much on account of the painstaking
way the branching world has of reminding
you that, with all things being
equal, our living
through the suffering
of these infrequent raptures pales when considering
what might be lurking
behind, or beyond, say, a painting or a piece of writing
that didn't itself have an inkling,
an innerspring
of desire for everything
else, including 
what it's trying
to become, as in something
of a process, an indispensable, indisposable 'othering'
of the world through being
itself  (with you or without you), and what it's like, like a human 
being
on the wing,
capable of being
imagined, as in conceiving
oneself without uttering
a thing, 
as simply being,
in itself rewarding,
a rewording,
not by relating, not by identifying,
but by fascinating, entrancing,
like the action and the fact of a swing,
oscillating




Botsford, Alan. mamaist: learning a new language. Kamakura, Japan, Minato No Hito, 2002.