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EPILOGUE
Robert Lowell

Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with dim eyes and threadbare art
seems a snapshot
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme--

Is when you look ahead too much and too soon. Or somehow it is all a matter of timing. Time and tardiness. Either you're early or late, and always, always you'll find no one to blame (maybe your self, if you're humble or in great need of closure.) It is not simply a matter of waiting, but presuming. No, not wishful thinking, but presuming--something more real and practical.

You meet someone so easy to get along with. Not just easy to get along with, but someone you immediately trust and admire as any long-time friend. You meet, become friends, and feel no need, no urgency of asking each other's telephone number, mobile number, e-mail address. Weird, but right. Because it becomes easier to part. What is new with what I'm about to say?: It is better (but only sometimes--some times) to be disconnected, solitary. Away.

But suddenly?

(For Sandy and Alyssa; for Chie, Cecile and Kathy. But mostly for Alyssa.)

I.
I understand something.
The person next to me cannot understand what I understand.

I feel happy about an event.
The person next to me ignores that event.

You are beautiful.
The person next to me thinks otherwise.

III.
Before, when I'm asked the questions: "What supernatural power would you like to have?" and "If you could do any thing for a moment, what would you do?", I would answer, "be invisible." Now, I would like to get into the consciousness, (unconsciousness), psychology etc. of another person. Both of the person whose mind I admire and the one whom I perceive as a simpleton.

How and what does Mother Teresa actually thinks? Bin Laden? Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo? The security guard at the bank?

Maybe it would be like knowing the poet's intention behind the poem.

I want to enter and experience a person's thoughtscape / mindscape.