you fashion images in the mind and count them.
You step back from the brink of thought,
from cognitive manipulation, to pure envisionining.
The sheep jump the wall, the skier parses new trails
on the mountain, swooping between spruce trees.
Elizabeth walks through homes she has known:
an old apartment in Chicago, our beloved hovel
on Jane Street, her childhood house in Baltimore.
What’s down this hall, which door is the closet?
Turn on the light, examine the faded wallpaper,
move through the space, feel it, inhabit it.
What’s been subtracted is a kind of pictorial syntax,
the filmic and interpretive operations of the mind
driving the images forward. Or, is that wrong?
You must remember to count the leaping sheep,
to engage the algebraic half of the mind,
which is the left or the right? Does it matter?
Two hemispheres, globe and brain,
night and day, the mad serendipity of it all.
What is the evolutionary purpose of sleep?
What is knowledge? Why are we alive?
Where is this world we find ourselves in?
How can we understand it? Who are we?
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