The future enters into us

Ruth, Danville, Virginia, 1968
photographer: Emmet Gowin


The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.
-Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet

excerpt from "Finding Her" by Brenda Hillman

Listen. You don't have to do anything.
The raccoon is in the garbage can, selecting an eggshell;
there's a patch of moonlight
on the rug. Get up, stand in it, be seen through---

And out in the night
where the ragged patches converge:

everything that lets go
still has its memory of attachment
and that which refused to let go
still has its uses---

excerpt from "Finding Her" by Brenda Hillman, from _Death Tractates_.
Wesleyan University Press. 1992.

Susie and Bill/ 1968

From Jimmy's collection of found photographs.

The parted water reunites behind our hand.

The parted water reunites behind our hand. Pleasure is taken out of pleasant things, profit out of profitable things, power out of strong things, the moment we seek to separate them from the whole. We can no more halve things and get the sensual good, by itself, than we can get an inside that shall have no outside, or a light without a shadow. "Drive out nature with a fork, she comes running back."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Compensation"