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"I am in the backseat of my parents' car."

We are driving. It is very bright, but the sky is only half-heartedly blue.

I think: I Love this Land.

However far I go
--and I do go far--
This is the landscape of my heart.

My parents are talking --

We pass a police car at the side of the road.

--I don't hear their words, just drift along the pulse of their voices:

RISE and fall, RISE and fall. Like the slither of life

on a heart monitor, on a bad TV show.

Or a good one.

I am thinking about poetry. What-

I think is not important.

The speed limit is now 80:

we slow down, and

the car behind us, does not.

Thin and distant as a margin,

I think "these trees could be

a mirage," but for the wind

moving through them--

intimately, like my hair

inside, outside, and between the bristles of a brush-- some of which catches,

exhales, and is no longer a part of me.

*

Incidentally the highways pictured here are not the ones I was driving on.

If that's not symbolism I don't know what is.

*

On sunday I will go away. This is not real to me.

All that is real is this day, the sky, a stretch of highway so familiar i could find my way home in a dream. Good.

I could not do it awake.

Home...

A song stuck in my head. But the tune keeps changing, and I've forgotten the words.

Maybe there are no words for the "things" that burrow closest to the heart.

All we can do is send out little sparks of thought and hope a little light may fall on the truth. Though I'm not at all sure I would recognize the truth if I saw it. Or that I'd want to.

I read somewhere that all the energy in existance is here already, and will never leave. So-

even when you die, some part of you stays alive.

I like this idea.

Of course if it can seperate itself and live on without you, it couldn't have been yours to begin with.

This is like "culture": in anthropology they tell you (me?) that culture cannot be owned, therefore cannot be stolen. This was not on the exam, but i remember it anyway.

Anthropology, which i have taken to calling anth., in my notes at least, gives one the disconcerting feeling that nothing really belongs to you. This might not be a bad thing.

What is the purpose of "owning" after all? Life would be much easier as a continual form of lease -though you might say it was that already.

I won't say the best things in life are free. But the best things in life cannot be owned, or coveted. You can't own air, or time, or the sky.

The sky --half-heartedly blue, as it is-- is the same here as in Argentina, where very soon I will look up at it and love its distance, and its closeness.

Everything is shared.

*

Even energy.

*

N.