To Jenny Holzer

All the art here is language. The rest of this world, too. You throw your dispatches on marquees and billboards and they nail me to the cement and tourists. I walk to the nearest park, find a granite bench, and on it the imprint of your voice going on about control or tenderness—I cannot even tell the difference anymore. Why is life in a city always such a test? Materials of excess, we continue only as long as the culture that created us; lead us from stone to electronic altar and we will not be able to tell if we wanted this or if it is just your own private joke. Your words come from your own head or the poets or the blacked up transcripts of war—clean and simple variations. I see them now in the park: the t-shirts and flyers you release to point out how much pain we swallow, our historic buildings you make sing in the night. There are no surprises; I know I know you; what the world pushes from itself I find in the light that billows from your open mouth. But your words are so tall we cannot see their tops. We cannot see their tops and live.