glow (one of the better texts)

[Alan Sondheim]

glow


perhaps like bachelard, believing in the secret life of things.
but is a reference necessary? things have their own glows, lives.
these lives are my comfort zones

the mystery of the vacuum, filament glows, hearths, from bulbs, tubes,
unlike the flatness of lcd screens (their own colder glows, glacial,
nonetheless kindly, empathetic)

when i was young, i would make drawing after drawing, tiny villages
from above, surrounded by protecting walls, almost a maze to enter,
i was safe there, i could leave, return home against the onslaught
and violence of others

sparking in vacuums, closed glass bells, inert and noble gases, and
the orange hue, the promise of life in the heart of radiation, of
radiation in the beating heart of life

throbbing candle flames, lanterns, amplifier and preamplifier tubes,
delight of email, lives through wire-nerves, radiation-nerves,
speaking to me, whisperings from the planet through the hours of day
and night, distant glimmers of eternity

darkling protocols, your imaginary voices, voices of the imaginary,
here i am, here you are, there i am, there you are, thinnest of
glass enclosures, rounded and subtle, skeins of lives and families,
murmurings of love, colorations

vacuum uncanny, our absence from visible space, emptied, but not
quite, the quantum hearth churns, there are radiations, gravitations,
crossroads of silences, rumors of darkness and universal endings

but cathodic, traumatic, heatings, warmth of instrumentations, that
slightest trembling, our passional heat, our soft sleepings within
the blanketings of worlds and lazy atmospheres



the seed - ( secret interior life / drawings w/
comfort zones / mysteries of the vacuum
glass / throbbing )

( our universe tiny, our place smaller, we huddle against the cold
to come, we will have gone by then, we will unremember )