the glass path

Another self-conscious little story that I'll never finish
is about the glass path...
the wet winter
made the grasses of the spring
tangled and thick,
in the place that I walk the dogs.

soon the paths, which had been quite clear,
were overgrown, invisible.

Later the summer threshes down these weeds,
breaking them and turning them yellow,
revealing again the pathways
where animals and people had formerly walked.

A few had disappeared,
disused because of their extended impassibility,

Some are now discerned as false starts,
lines beaten down by winds that lead nowhere,

but most remain evident
despite the seasonal occlusion.

These summer moments reveal so many ineffable, intangible aspects of "the path"
--is it a thing? --when did it appear?

It often seems inferred from a scintilla of sensory deviations, terrifyingly inclined toward error. Does it even exist?

When considered closely these imponderables give way easily,
the defining characteristics of even a path faintly seen
are a multiplicity of cues, not really a sparseness,
because though of course it's possible to imagine
a breadcrumb trail consisting of only a few, a single, no points at all,
that's not what usually occurs. Instead we see and discern a sensory waterfall of data.

But yes, we know that there is a tension between
the number and quality of these cues and the perception of the thing,
and we see that it requires just a very few of them to make it happen.
So why do we imagine that much effort is needed to create our own?

Fact is, if a skilled eye can detect a clear path
in a few bent and broken stalks,
it should require no more than the placement
of a few cigarette butts or beer cans
to achieve the same functionality.
But here we run afoul of the art police,
because who ever appreciates a litterbug?

If a man were an Andy Goldsworthy he'd do it with organic integrity,
materials essential to the environment, assembled with reverence, obvious style.
Does this paradigm apply in a dust heap?
Or to the literal wasteland in which we wander?
Remember, we're talking about me, here,
a few hours of spare time.

We came here first two decades ago,
a friend had mentioned a "china beach,"
shades of some flavor of heroin,
a place in Frisco,
Viet Nam.

But actually a magically prosaic landfill
the base of an expeditionary probe
into the waters of the SF bay
The Berkeley pier.

I always explained it as the discards from a pottery works
maybe because of that name. Actually
the stretch of beach that's slowly eroded from the bank
contains more glass than ceramic. It's the rarer blue shards
you notice first, medicines and jars of ointment,
then the heaps of broken beer-glass
Amber, Emerald, Clear
tumbled to translucence by the tug of the tides.

You know how beautiful colored glass looks beneath water.
We gathered five large buckets of it that first day, they're still
lined up against our back fence. These days
I measure my takings in pocketsfull,
with which I mark my paths.

OK, fine, which path shall I then mark?
It's as difficult as steering
a course through conceptual art.
See, there are these other
more or less mundane
traditions of a Saturday
* The walking of the dogs
* Hablando en espanol
* The Bird of the Day
* And so much more!

Am I milestoning
El Camino Real?
The mojones I pounded into the dirt surface
of the road well-traveled
were ground under la grava del rey
(for the betterment of the dominion).

Do we refine and define the sweet scent of urine?
In college, I proposed an artwork,
a foundation, really,
promulgated seasonally by
the endless fascination that
the dogs of winter
had with refrozen corners in the yellow snow
and the matrix it defined.
(also scraped away by snowplows)

Or shall I show you where the wild things are
a white-tailed kite balancing arrogantly on the top of a juniper
a skunk surprised, an excellently restrained dog
(he thought it was a cat) :)

Or...?

No, I shouldn't leave you hanging.
Number 6 in the 10 great ways to get rich
is to imagine that a low-cost, no hassle solution
to a serious obstacle exists.
And to understand
that in our expanding megaverse
others will always have the same vision
or an appreciation of it
for example
my idea for a science fiction book,
the subsequent discovery of
a charged particle or meme,
the 'motivacion",
(the smallest unit of operable will)

Or else my meditation on
the clarinet,
how disappointed I was
to discover that it is
"virtually defective",
(And why it doesn't matter.)

Meaning that, just because something
is allegedly inexpressible
is no excuse for not trying to express it.