9/9/97
9 am

Each word as it comes forth is a digression, a history of its own.  It could never be something of mine.  It is owned by history, by a commonality.  These words connect us before I even set them down.  Before I have said anything, I question the saying.  If I must interrogate each stone, my building will not be grand, no castle or monument.  Perhaps it will simply be a row of stones, or a jumble, a collection, a cairn, a garden of stones. 

If I wrote of the tantalizing atmosphere, the continual sensation of about-to-rain that has persisted since yesterday, the damp cloudiness, the pinked gray of dusk then dawn that refuses to lose moisture to the thirsty ground, then I would raise a jumble of questions.  A patterned field of stone lies between us, historied and mysterious.  Issues of place, fact, person, metaphor.  We are each the center of our respective universes, but we like to make ourselves the clouds and the ground as well, to pretend that the atmosphere can tantalize, and the soil thirst.