Hikes in Winter Park

Fast tracks, a catalogue of signs, sticks
Sticking into the lonely snow:
I miss these wild groves, the aster elms'
Star-like dance; I miss the trance of lines
Bleeding under the powder, packed
Surface of frigid feet, whether elks'
Or boot eating skis, tracking their picking pokes,
Mountains nodding through still air, rabbits
Darting over frozen ground.

Things are better today. Last night I was strangled with lust, crushed under the weight of a bodiless body, embodied in the lack of all bodies, or one.

I'm trying to be productive, something to do at every hour of the day. Writing is a good way of focusing my thoughts onto a page. The page really controls you; I used to think I was creating worlds, but really I'm being created. Let me explain. Words and ideas are inseparable; the Romans believed that Piety, Justice, Victory, and Concord were gods. The words denoted deity; that is, ideas. Likewise, our conceptions are indelibly (and perhaps ineffably) linked to the words we use to describe them. When I say, "The impact of the Third Reich" – whatever Third Reich means as an independent concept, it maintains none of that freedom because in the sentence it has become a principal of collision. Birth, growth, life, and death – motion and stasis – these are the inevitable principals, that is, the first things, out of which all thought springs.

But poetry is inescapable. I want to tell you what I really mean, but every telling is the reworking, the revision of another telling, connected by repetitive phrases, by a repeating ego, by certain habits and facts, or doings, that make me who I am and not any other random predilection.

Last night I sat down at a computer and hacked out some very worrisome phrases, then I looked for any body I could. Lust is a delicious pain – if I could take a pill to eliminate these cravings, that is, to expel them from the threshold of my being...such a theatrical guest! Life becomes infinite under the power of lust, and because I can turn a blind eye to every other pursuit, because I'm blinded, deafened by the hideous roar of the music – such a cruel and powerful god. But it's nice to worship a god.

I wrote three or four pages yesterday. I'll write more. I have no more time to write letters today. I wish I could have sent you something descriptive rather than philosophical. I'm keeping all this.