The "story" is in the language. . ./ And we begin in "rain" (noting, now, that important moment in Fahrenheit 451)

I read my novella anew today: "You like the rain?" the book-burner conscript Montag retorts, as if to offer an irrefutably universal dislike to the inquisitive teacher Clarisse in Fahrenheit 451--as if rain, to the annoyance of everything, clearly follows its own course (and therefore to no good. . . ). . . as if liking that which we cannot control would be crazy; --as if giving-in to something whose nature amounts, contributes, and does not at its base reduce or destroy is a form of weakness? Or do we disavow the barriers enforced to contain us? "You like the rain?" he cites as if to seal any argument for liking rain. Yet Clarisse's joyful reply is as loose as rain, "I adore it!" So now Che and this moment come to language in common. (Che begins with rain.) I had not realized it, but this was the fitting note to begin a textual revolution.

If I may, the story is in the language.

D.H. Lawrence, Garrison Keillor, Charles Wright: As Clouds Go By

First there were these words, by D.H. Lawrence (my compadre in general resemblance, I was once told by someone who was hooked on Lawrence): "[W]here the still warm air is full of the scent of pinks, spicy and sweet, and a stack of big red lilies a few yards away. . . ." The "painterliness," the attraction to "the scent of pinks," and the fact of a spring more like summer and summer now full in spring in Vermont presently told me once again Che is part of a lineage.

Then, this (a rare Almanac piece about language itself, and in expressionistic terms): "The world's an untranslatable language/
. . . It's a language of objects/ Our tongues can't master,/ but which we are the ardent subjects of." the speaker in Charles Wright's poem says. "If tree is tree in English,/ and albero in Italian,/ that's as close as we can come/ To divinity, the language that circles the earth/ and which we'll never speak."

The "divinity" of the tongue has always quickened the heartbeat especially in the gift of eyes. I believe we arrive there--"there"--where we make lush anything that will agree in that tension. The textual is made vivid in a sense-world for whom those keys and pads, windows and textures, are a vital drumming: A vitality layered in an accumulating sensuality, be this textuality or painterliness or the long extended nuanced--dance, say; sniff at tides, spray of wave to lips, memory and connection that is instant and sustaining.

I return to Che for this purpose, even as its author. I'd like to share the affinity.

Several years ago one of my poems was aired on Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac" and, since then as before, I listen to his delivery when I can (in 1994 it was the sound of Billy Collins' poems over a radio on the top floor overlooking San Francisco Bay where I worked, and I thought--at the time--that the man behind the poem, or anyone with a name like "Billy Collins," must be a long since retired Merchant Marine, perhaps no longer with us [I would come to realize we were both little-enough-known poet-teachers in the same system, at the City University of New York; former colleagues, in fact]). Although my office radio mysteriously disappeared after many moments of pause while The Writer's Almanac aired at work over that year, what's found there frequently meets me where I am and provides impetus, springboard, connection with what needs to be done next.

The Reader's Potentials: Well-known translator's take on Che.

A friend & translator writes, "still, and again, engrossed in the masterfulness of 'Che' language. It is a rare thing in prose
these days that a writer does not write 'to the reader' but to the art of creating something that makes a reader re-visit his own potentials."

Of course I'm grateful for what's said there.

Re-reading the epigraphs to section three, Acolyte, this morning I realized, again, just how important those are to the text--and revealing in the order and way in which they amount. I hope they are "permission" and "affinity" both, and more. I read them as a kind of Greek Chorus, preluding each section of Che.