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Just-hatched eastern phoebe nestlings in the portico over my front door.

Manzotti is what they call a radical externalist: for him consciousness is not safely confined within a brain whose neurons select and store information received from a separate world, appropriating, segmenting, and manipulating various forms of input. Instead, he offers a model he calls Spread Mind: consciousness is a process shared between various otherwise distinct processes which, for convenience’s sake we have separated out and stabilized in the words subject and object. Language, or at least our modern language, thus encourages a false account of experience.

you know that even an only
steady rain can beat back
the just-purpled heads of

lavandula: and so you set
the pot to shelter under the deck
awning until the mist has risen

from the trees. You wait until
the air has rinsed to clear,
remembering the Old French

lavandre, to wash, the Latin
lavare, also to wash, as you go in
to close your eyes in the bath.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

A rare attempt at a concrete poem.

In response to small stone (95).

Clamor, raucous clamor, of cicadas amid the trees— Who has not
heard those notes before? Uncanny, insistent, especially in return.

How would you feel if you had only one brief window to leave your
mark, to wed your fate, then fade? I’d do it over too, upon return.

And it’s all good, is what it seems to say: not just the joys but all wrong turns,
chances missed, errors, hurts. But to repeat them all, to have them all return?

Not merely bear the necessary, Nietzsche says: still less to conceal it.
Most days I try but fail to completely understand how fate is love, returned.

One summer we walked along the seawall at dusk. The waters roiled
with humid vapors. A cyclone cloud of gnats circled above, then returned.

The wings of insects shimmer, their bodies hard like minerals in the dusky
light. You can’t pick out only the heart of dark obsidian for return.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Our worries, we confided around the campfire, are long and keeping. No matter where we are, they stay with us. But when we camp, everything is so much bigger, we don’t think beyond the fire ring. Up here it was easy to fall silent. Sweet, really, to have an empty mind.

What I’ve always loved about the notion of the ten thousand things is that we ourselves are included in their number. Human beings, the Zhuangzi says, ‘are but one item’ amongst the countless things of the world. We are not separated out from the world. We are not a separate creation. I find this restoring of human existence to the thingness of things—this restitution of our status as things in the world, in the same way that cats and telephone poles and supernovae are things—a huge relief after centuries of philosophical labour that sought to demonstrate that we are set apart from other things.

In response to “Hands.”

into the evening sky until nothing is left
of its body save for a silver-white curl
thinner than the edge of a rose petal,

the attentive reader knows that this
is a trope, both shorthand and preparation
for what happens in the next scene or chapter:

the one where the family patriarch, gone
into the meadow to retrieve a ball tossed too
far by his grandson, crumples to the ground

in the fringed shadow of tall grasses;
or the one where the guests come across
their friend who never returned to join them

for after-dinner drinks, slumped in the garden
in a wicker chair— And the other tropes that
follow: dusk reflecting off a raindrop’s filmy

surface, everything caught in trembling,
minute accuracy: prismed lights from a nearby
window, orange haze against deepening

blue, white gauze of a scarf or handkerchief
the woman brings to her mouth or her cheek
to stifle a cry or staunch a sob— And over

and underneath it all, the water’s rhythms,
steady and unchanging; papery hulls of leaves
and blossoms, floating away on the current.

In response to small stone (96).