I have this memory of sitting in a field of wildflowers with bees buzzing about and Tchaikovsky and Wagner in my ears and nearby children float in a sea-themed carousel, rising and falling, rising and falling and gliding past clinging to plastic painted fishes rising and falling a mechanical grotesque fish school with strange incidental riders gliding while I wonder why this carousel can’t live up to its name and be underwater where my head is swimming, fish and riders tracing their perfect circles submerged and the thought dizzies me as I watch and only see the bees buzzing because my ears are stopped up with orchestras that rise and fall in measured intervals so that I think the fish carousel is playing each note like we used to long ago believe the celestial spheres did high above

and for a long long time I insisted on looking up up up high above because I wanted to float up and away, carried up out of the water and away by sight alone like a tractor beam up up into aerials outlined by edges of buildings and pieces of trees as if I were an alien misfit from other places and times wanting—curious—to look back down seeing seas below and everyone swimming circles swimming circles like tiny little hum-buzzing universes and the whole thing harmonious and orchestral.

But for the time being it’s no longer like that, and here I sit instead on solid stone steps fondly remembering this memory of a place and scene I never really saw but only heard of and added to like the thief I am and what’s it mean to really see anyway. I sit here and notice that look around is all there is to do now and backward is the only way to hear the truth. I really see. And I begin to question transformation even as I feel it, feeling transformation transform into something loosely known and always sort of been like misnamed sea carousels and thinking change might be a grandiose misnomer for manifestation

and in that thought the current moves me from loops to associations and it all links up like chains do and the sun warms and I know it doesn’t matter what really see means because I remember how just yesterday I heard Marhsall say he never thinks of the paintings he makes as self-expression, but exclusively as platforms for ideas and now right now that idea is again once again of the sea, coming back around again, round and round but in another manifestation right in the middle and now right now beside her, whispering sweetness, knowing nights of love deep underwater while petals of soft words float by like strange fishes and the secret places of my body throb with memories like eyes while she sits silently beside me with disheveled hair and I wonder who the real thief was, me or Rilke

and it all comes back around, round and round and different other more—to more is where the current takes us, steals us away in the deep dark night, and as we rise and fall together lung to lung, I understand manifestation and ocean currents, how things I before only loosely beheld now really mean the sea to me, I really see.