In the beginning was the word, but now the word is "buy low, sell high." The word was green, and from this green of the word, a New World. In the beginning the word was sound, and sound an image waiting for the pigment and brush and hard rock surfaces. When the word became word, it was light's turn to hide in the ink.

"I was astonished and completely absorbed in Dale's new book. Deeply beautiful, the domesticity, the friendships, the ranting, the quality of detail, the resonant tenderness of his sentences. It gleams. So lustrous in its clarity, it is as though he had fallen off a cliff and with his heart in his mouth glimpsed each of these moments in a slow motion exactness, the sequence of bathetic experiences that make up the meaning of a life."
-- Forrest Gander

Excerpts from The Flood & The Garden

It was not clear to me until recently that these pages formed a daybook. My intent was narrative in nature, laid out, in retrospect, on values dear to Kerouac: "order, tenderness and piety." I also (as will be apparent,) followed closely William Carlos Williams, finding in his Spring and All, The Descent of Winter and other works from the 1920s the formal conception and energy for this work. Its success or failure lies in the determination of my faculties of perception, and their employment on behalf of the imagination. If nothing else, this is a book of myth, the flood and the garden competing images by which I found some bearing one spring at the crossroads of two millenniums.

***

". . . meeting in the forked young branch of eternity . . ." There's enough stupid shit immediately perceptible and endlessly open to ridicule and derision. The fact of any day job proves that dealing with assholes and idiots becomes second nature. Our tough skins form masks. But that other, a Remora, stuck to a ship in the sea, it calls for us to find. Intelligence is not universal, but it's common enough. An understanding of our nature, and a care to act according to it, remains a greater difficulty. Or for others, a confrontation of that nature enforces a conflict of some magnitude. I'm counting bodies killing time. Nine dead in a Jerusalem pizzeria today.

***

My turtle curls close to my neck. His soft breath sweet passes my neck and shoulders. So many hours pass, watching him, gripped by some biological tenderness. His fat cheeks and bright look check my fear, my servitude in a washed-out economy. He is a world, a still-diving light of penetrating life. He burps and we walk the dark room as dawn's gray light spreads.