Thirty spokes converge on a hub
but it’s the emptiness
that makes a wheel work
pots are fashioned from clay
but it’s the hollow
that makes a pot work
windows and doors are carved for a house
but it’s the spaces
that make a house work
existence makes a thing useful
but nonexistence makes it work.
— Lao-tzu from ‘Taoteching: With Selected Commentaries from the Past 2,000 Years’, tr. from Chinese by Red Pine
"The colours of their middle-age
are a midsummer tease, matching
hues, bluing into blue into bluish-
white in the distance. So here we are
too, a gallery of gazes
looking on these affairs—easy
chairs on the veranda."
"now trace a breath-map in the air. how invisible?
is a rose a turning cylinder of senses? how unspeakable
is this the ghost of the heart, the actual
the inmost deceleration of its thought? how unspeakable
is everything still speeding around us?"
How many scams must we endure?
These broken pipe-dreams of the rich,
of the breathless entrepreneur,
among their piles of cash they hitch
the risks to us through means obscure.
"She hovers at the window, alert to how the house breathes, exhalations as the front door opens, shudders. She hears movement. Footfalls, creaks, the downstairs kitchen cupboards. House-breaths rattle her apartment door the slightest, ripple. If the house was a body, the hallway and the staircase might be lungs."