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The Nine Thousand Names

by  blp

Posted: Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Word Count: 412
Summary: In progress I guess - one of at least two versions I have of this




First of all, sincerest thanks
For something or other – hard
Or something to put into words

But thank you. A young woman
Lived at the bottom of a lift shaft
And sat in a chair. She sat
in a chair and thought about Amsterdam
And a metal barrier
About a certain sort of shape like an organ
And about a city where lots of people all did
And walked about beside a fountain
Humming, talking to, or some had dogs
Or sheep and there was no way up
Through the building where other people lived
And this position
Was a young woman
Somewhere in the city
Whose eyes saw
And whose mind’s mouth felt
What was in all of this
Was true
And was her

A girl walked along a road beside a lake of yellow water. A plane followed the same route in the sky. She was going to see her father and his friends and bringing them a cake. She sat down and ate the cake and threw away the box ran along the road met her father in squares, movements of objects, being inside matter and not at its edge and about being detached she told him and he enjoyed it.

Two men were friends
told each other their thoughts.

A man went into a room and inside it was a staircase. He went up it to an attic with a large, high window out of which you could only see the sky, which was bright blue and below it, with its back to it, was a soft chair facing a collection of useful objects – ladders, buckets, trolleys, tools.
He stood on the chair and thought about pencil circles and jackets turned inside out.
He thought about rolling discs, compression, coastlines, energy, eggs, iron in soil, the paper of books, friendship, sex, pets and foreign languages. And from each he
was the flutter
The germ of him
Was in
Each breath of an idea
Of him breathing

A little boy saw different shapes in things
and showed his mother who told him
their names
were undecided
and they both
understood

A man and a woman were friends
told each other their thoughts.
They were shapes like oceans
They were shapes like lakes
They were shaped like shapes
They were shaped like blue sailboats
In bright, blinding sunlight
Bouncing off the lake
Like people sitting by the lake
And in pink sailboats
Telling each other

First of all,