The title poem from Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest has a stanza (the middle of three) that goes

Cattle stare at flat-bed haulers gunning clumps
of black smoke and lugging damaged drill pipe
up the gullied, mud-hollowed road. Road, this
road. Roustabouts shouting from the crow’s nest
float like Ascension angels on a ring of lights.
Chokecherries gouge the purpled sky, cloud-
swags running the moon under, and starlight
rains across the Ford’s blue hood. Blue, this blue.

I know what he means by “Blue, this blue.” I understand that “blue” the word, and that colour, they both hold the same things, this set of experiences, these feelings. The memories float under the word and when it is used; there they are, pushing up against awareness, skewing perception a little to the left, a little right.

Rudbeckia hirta

The Rudbeckia, for me, is like this. In its Fall form there is a bag it carries, full of memory and feeling that transfer — onto a poem, an essay by Searles, my sense that the moon pulls at me, sliding as it does, invisible across the day-sky.

Bits from that Rudbeckia bag spill out at the oddest moments. Sometimes I can figure it out, but others? No. But I trust it, this ability to transfer meaning acquired one way, and then transfered to some other entity, by some other process, to be used some other way. The thing I would love to know…how are we able to do this?

Which is, of course, is how I come to be reading Searle and Lakeoff and Johnson.

By the way, the moon has set and the leeks are soaking in the sink.