April 20th 

Today I heard lunes again. I enter that in my notes because it seems to me the last time I heard lunes must have been last summer. It meant something to me then. I wrote it down then. I write it down again now. Another fact: two birds are in the water, not directly in front of me but to the left. When I look to the left I can also see, in the bottom corner of my periphery, my naked shoulder. Something else last winter that happened: I kept writing. I’m writing now in the beginning of spring. I’m standing in my bathing suit. It’s April 20th, by no means the beginning of spring. The two birds I see out there are not lunes. They seem to be ducks, one with a coin-shaped head pulled off to a tip, white breast, black beak. Its other—well, they’re gone now, I can’t describe its other. I say its other because I assume them to be together. I assume this because I’ve seen such couples floating around on this blue spilt platform of steel. While I was looking for the lunes, while I was looking for the lunes. I must keep confident now as I go forward. I’m just beginning to sense the outlines of this thing. Is it only notes as I said it was to begin with, notes as this note now is simply a note about what it might be? I’m collecting notes on what it might be, so that when I’m done I can look at it and say what it is—I know what it is because I knew what it was while I was doing it. But is it true that I know what it is while I’m doing it? It seems there’s a small hole in the circumference of what I see—that is the totality of this thing—a small hole, which like the optical nerve at the back of the eye leads to the brain, which like a black hole in space sucks all matter and light and who knows what else into it—the totality, too, of what I’m saying, constantly slips through this optical nerve black hole, while my eyes look at it and suck back what it is, into me—the totality. These ducks, whatever kind they are, floating in pairs. Those lunes, wherever they are, unfindable. This is what I take notes on. And I’ve taken notes on this before, so what is new? Why these notes? Well, simply because in this I know not what it is I’m looking for, or what it is I’m doing, and I don’t want to, because I want to look at it after and see its totality—that it existed within bewilderment, hanging onto facts such as I found the other to that black duck with the coin-shaped head pulled off to a tapered point, almost like an eye going into an optic nerve going into a brain. The other is smaller, its head less outlined, less large, less pulled to a tapered point. Its plumage more brown. I assume the ornate duck to be the male, as is common amongst other ducks—well, the only other duck I know, the mallard—who just like this duck has between its two sexes more opulence in the appearance of its males. Opulence and finesse. I make these notes. I don’t want to stop. I pace back and forth across my room. I say what I’m doing, because I need to say what it is this is—but I can’t say what this is knowing that all of its meaning is still being pulled through that black hole puncturing its surface tension. The ocean, sand, the grass, the fact that no leaves are out—although, they’re trying, elephant grass, it’s trying, rhubarb, it’s trying, I saw an ash tree earlier trying—all of them to push out these shiny leaves folded, still bearing the creases of their folds—but to stretch taut out of those folds a sleek surface across a leaf fully formed will appear sometime in the summer, and likely before the beginning of summer. Not until my eyes see it will it become part of this, which has outgrown me again and led me to think now might be the time to stop. On the other hand though, the leaves are working hard, constantly without stopping, and I’ve been dying lately—dying and dying, doing less and less of this, my writing—taking notes.