Like surfing the Web

Writing, like surfing the Web. You're reading a webpage and notice a link, in a sidebar, say, and you think you'll click on it when you finish what you're reading. But what you were reading has led to a different link. You click on that one, read that webpage, and click a link there to some other site, etc., until you end up someplace very different from that first link you noticed when your surfing started. But that link not followed is as much a part of your reading as the links followed. What's the difference between a link not taken and a link taken but mostly forgotten? The browser history won't show the link not taken, but it's in you, like a little black rock. Shakes loose and gets stuck in an interior nook of you, like a bit of dirt in your shoe. And so writing the writer is struck by an idea, or image, or series of words. An angle, a slant, a take. A nuance. Phrase mentally noted but not set down. Not yet. Not yet. Till not yet becomes never. But it's always there. Even if it's eventually forgotten on the surface. There in the authorial mind at least. A parenthetical of the unconscious mind. Less parenthetical (like this) than parenthetical like this.

WHY I AM NOT A PAINTER
by Frank O'Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.