Domesticated surfaces

Western Guizhou from the highway

The plain's as flat as calm water exceptfor intermittent hills that breach the surfacelike an armada of whales cresting for air.The soft profiles and green, domesticatedsurfaces of the hushed leviathansbelie those caves and streams that likely runwithin, possibly nursing lakes or springsa province distant.

The Whiteness

(driving from Tianjin to Baoding)

Every direction—dim whiteness as faras eye could see, though there's no "far" withouthorizons. While I drifted in and outwe drove—the ghostscape stayed the same. Arethere other sorts of progress? Blankness marrednot by shapes but dusky dreamy edgesof albino apparitions, pledgesthat life goes on behind blanket bizarre.

Buildings approach, presumably painted likeharlots but bled of every color bythe universal shadow medium—the supernatural sur-Midas strikeseach surface with his self-same tedium,vast un-irised and un-pupiled eye.

Sense of touch

(after Magritte's The Lovers, MoMA)

A mute and calm companion, cooled and seta surface of waved lead, long roodsof swells defined by shadows from projectedconfidence and fidelity, speechless faint.They say that nothing ever touches—weapproach not skin but like repellent charge.A kiss is not contact, but repulsion. Asmy single fever returns, so comesan antic concept perhaps from which the bestregulated mind is not always free,the hatchet-polishing rage to cut the knot,to whip away the canvas, to lash out,to crack the hive of subtlety and climbinside. An icy sail fixed on a pole,she weightless turns and soothes my ticklish shakeswith the smooth tact and creamy coolness ofthe sharpest razor—harmonious reserve—I fear this keel that gently cleaves the sea,for all the license it allows us in some things,is at bottom a hard and bitter master.