Here, basically, is the thing
that we do. Whatever else you
may hear is decoration. What-
ever else he might say, is a
guy's way of gaining permis-
sion to excuse himself to go
do this. Whatever else you
may have thought, is natural-
ly very flattering, but kick
back. This is what we do.
I can't allow you to come
to this page and then de-
part, with the impression
that this is complicated.
It is not. We are hydraulic.
We could have cracked
its mirror with a rock,
a branch that might have lifted
something muddy to the surface.
Instead we kept on staring
and the sun set, several times.
Somewhere it keeps setting,
waits for one of us to still
the thread that hums between us,
not gossamer but steel.
Somewhere you shimmer like the lake,
the picture on the glass is real,
and one of us says what we didn't say,
feels what we didn't feel.
our play and our rest are
savourings sustained by hy-
draulic splendour; our meta-
phors and our imagery of pos-
sibility are steeped in flow
and buoyancy, stillness and
swell.
Everything that Nature
tells us is elegant, she tells us is safe, certain. Even our dearest and most vulnerable extractions of life, such as wine, are expressions of that treas-
ure of which we are a part.
sea. These environments
of our most obvious nor-
mality never exhaust
their tug. We go where
we are wanted, and all
that we do there, in
our various ways, is
a reclamation for a
time. I have a friend
who slides on water,
I had a brother who
made war on it; the reciprocating pressure equalises profusion
without being told.
Have you left the lake?
I don't think so.
Jonathan Galassi
Left-Handed
Still Life [fragment]
op. cit.
iv Photograph Wynn Bullock
1954
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