Lucien Stryk studied with Gaston Bachelard

in Paris, 1948!

I just found out.

It's like suddenly finding a bowl of apricots

on the kitchen table downstairs,

one morning when the October sun half blinds you,

filling up the kitchen windows as you step in,

light dancing diagonally across the table,

not unlike Rebecca Solnit's experience

of a fermenting mound of apricots

in her book Faraway Nearby

I'm hard on old friends,

I know that, and that is why I lose them,

but there is no time or place for dissimulation anymore

A loss is pure gain,

ridding yourself of unnecessaries

I carry their faces with me, their voices,

general atmospheres from way back,

long before they started betraying themselves

with cowardice & stinginess

The kittens play so hard,

they could very well pass away, it seems,

but SK, EÖ, SWK, PS and others

long ago stopped seeing birds that flew

& lilies that bloomed

around their younger years

They horror-movied their existences,

making my abandonment diamond clear,

fresh-breathed, airy

There is a small stream

up in an old forest

not far from my bed,

in between moss laden rocks,

under old, mighty firs,

dewatering a wide bog up there

I don't have to be up there,

to hear the rippling

It's rippling through me

whenever I listen