Timelessness Now: A Phone Recorder Transcription

No way I can capture yesterday's experience,
when I was riding in my car with the GPS on
so I couldn't turn on the recorder app
and speak my experience into my phone. 

I was returning from St. Louis--about seven hours on the road.
Wonderful few days with my cousins,
whom I think I know a little better now,
never really having known them when I was younger
because my mother was averse to family gatherings
and lived far from her siblings,
and maybe had some embarrassing history--
painful memories that made it hard for her
to deal with her mother and father
and her brother and sister and their families.

But I was driving back. We had a very good time--
I felt like I was receptive--listened well enough.
And sometimes I talked
amusingly, I guess, and not too much.
And I distributed the Emily book,
the Emily Phone Talk book--
Emily Ann Wenstrom 1955 - 2025--
which I was so happy to be able to do!
So happy to be able to bring poor departed Emily to the cousin reunion,
because she was a full-blooded cousin--she would have made a--
one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine--
she would have made a ninth cousin,
though youngest to die.
And so she did come--her book came, anyhow--and I gave it to everyone,
and that felt good.

And I was driving back. And I had planned to try to buy hemp flower
at the Prairie Island Indian reservation,
because I had heard that you could do that.
I didn't have a very good idea of where the reservation was,
but I had my GPS guide me there,
and sure enough I saw a liquor store advertising cannabis,
and I stopped, and I asked the man if he had sativa flower,
and he said this was mainly a liquor not a hemp store
so he just had one thing, which luckily was sativa,
so he asked me how much,
and I told him half an ounce,
and he went and got it,
and it was a half sandwich bag full of lovely-looking buds,
and he asked for a hundred dollars, and I counted out
the hundred in cash,
for which he thanked me, because it saved him on taxes.

So we said Have a good one! and I went out into the parking lot,
and immediately stuffed a tiny piece into my hitter
and took two hits,
and then I put everything into my pocket,
and the sandwich bag into my backpack,
and I said, Careful now!
and I backed up and drove out of the parking lot,
following my GPS,
and a minute later I saw a beautiful bright sky with fluffy white clouds in it,
and I knew I was just as high as could be
and that my plans had come to complete fruition--
to flower--my plans were flowering before my eyes,
making me so very happy!

I had that moment of ecstasy.
And I wished that I had been speaking into my cell phone,
so that I could capture that moment in its very moment itself--
quite different from what I'm doing now,
which is just reconstructing the moment,
trying to explain the context of the moment
and to say that the moment happened
and that it was an ecstatic moment--
the bright blue sky with the fluffy white clouds in it,

I already said that, didn't I?

[Wind howl]

But I knew then that I would not be able to recapture it,
to capture a moment that was forever fled.
I regretfully recited a preliminary version of this poem that I'm speaking now,
but without the recorder on because I was afraid I'd lose the GPS
(it's a day later now that I'm recording this recitation
while out on a windy walk).

[Wind howl] 

[Traffic noise]

And I thought about Wordsworth crossing the alps without realizing it
and being disappointed that he had not
been present in the moment
when he

[Wind howl]

passed the summit--or however you would express that thought.
But then Imagination came rushing back:
The whole need

[Wind howl]

the entire desire for transcendent vision
was filled by what he calls Imagination.
I don't know if that was passion recollected in tranquility or not.
I don't know how tranquil I ever am.
I do believe that that moment of seeing the bright sky with fluffy clouds
was an ecstatic moment--
a moment beyond time--
a moment in which I disappeared
and became eternity itself.

Anyway, it turned out that Prairie Island is very close to the town of Hastings,
where I went with Don and Sherry many many times
to play Civil War music in funny Civil War reenactment events.
And I think I also played there one time with the Blue Drifters--
though I only remember standing outside the cafe door--
I don't remember much else about it.

But that's where the LeDuc mansion is--
Colonel William LeDuc--
but I think we're reenacting the American Civil War as a society right now--
I think Civil War reenactment is too serious a business for me
at this point in the history of my poor country.

So there we have it: My attempt to capture a foregone moment,
which I knew--we all knew--would fail.
Perfectly fine because this whole silly repetition of a repetition
leaves me nevertheless with the certainty that my life--
my
temporary life--
partakes of eternity
and is part of eternity,
and the me-my part of it is irrelevant--
I could just as well be anybody
or anything.
It makes me happy to feel that I know
that timelessness was once here now,
and therefore still is

[Funny clattery noises]