Rapid Rapid,

There are not enough stars in Boston. Stars, like the kind in the sky, which depending on how far you are, could be the icy tips of invisible stalactites or possibly, mutilated balls of burning gas floating aimlessly through a black void. Fortunately, we are very, very far, and the air outside is -- as it happens without fail in this neck of the woods in Maine -- very, very cold. So cold, in fact, that it feels like a different shade of cold every time I step outside, as if the particular combination of the stars and the wisps of clouds and the dry, clear night elicit a sort of poetic amnesia. A short term memory loss brought on by feelings of metaphysical insignificance, in turn brought on by the looming face of infinity every time I look up. Then there's the desire to record every drop of sensation somehow--in words, in calculable thoughts (etch it in the temporal lobe, practice dreaming), in action. But what performance of a verb could possibly capture frost? Or the cruel bent of a tree branch? In fact, I can tell you it's hardly cruel at all in the daylight, and that bodily ache of mine for a word or a sentence, a tome, a treatise on my right to be here, all but disappears after I've digested breakfast. This is the time of day when more than just thought comes into the light. Revelations. A remedy for hate in other people's countries, or for love in mine. No, nothing nearly so important. Whims. Insights. Poetry a delusion, a false celebration that we've mastered and intensified our experience and somehow established a nameless corner of humanity against the blank wall just beyond our crystalizing breath. But what it celebrates, indeed, deifies, is worth the falsehood. The critic T.E. Hulme hated romanticism, thought it mystical nonsense. But when I'm standing here, home but not home, the trees empty, having given their way to the freedom of spacious leaflessness, I wonder if he was just missing the point of his own insight:

By the perverted rhetoric of Rationalism, your natural instincts are suppressed and you are converted into an agnostic...You don't believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don't believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.

Here's to spilt religion: futile metaphors and wordless mumblings: prayer, expression, and the failure of both: to leaves, trees, the grass and the birds: quiet despair, rambling exultation, and the faint vibrations of stars in the firmament, in the dark, on cold, cold nights.