I can't find the poem right now, but it's Finnish or Norwegian or, it's snow country.  It's recording an annual event, the sheering of the sheep or maybe they are going to eat the sheep?  They are working chores on top of working and working family.  They are covered in earth and flesh.  The poem manages to capture the rhythms of both slow, steady and urgency.  In it the humans and the animals are one and different but the acts of living and purpose merge and muscle into the small amount of words portraying.

  There seems to be, already, the same sense in L. L. Cool's latest work.  I'm hearing it being heard in a lot of places.  It's not hype so much as authentic.  There is a quality of art knowing.  Even when we don't know the fancy intellectual words, or somehing is not familiar culturally, or we don't really know "art".

  The poem and the music record experience and something else too, I think.  The art taps into energy of change.  Thinking about nations these days we hear similar notions being discussed in relative position.  Nations decline and ascend, have ambitions and issues.  Battling isn't always with guns.  Survival as battle isn't always warring.  There are people, place, things which exist and disappear; and energy that tells story alongside.  We are not always at pivot and precipice.  And sometimes we lurch and rachet from stationery.  It can be awesome to witness movement, I think especially when so much of how we think of nation-doing has been oft trapped in stone of statue and fabric of flag.

  Reclamation

The word sounded good and strong coming out of Beulah's mouth.  I was slamming cords on the desk, target: next to but not on Orwell's essay "Why I Write".

  "What'd you say?"

  "Fucking words.  A list, I have a list of words.  Fucking seminars.  I have not a clue which words came from which seminar at this point."

  "What's the word?"

  "Reclamation." She closed her eyes and pictured.  Then she said, "Like clearing a garden to bulb."

  "And then storing the bulbs.  I did that with June, a lady in the Amherst area."

  We weren't totally hearing each other in that moment.  Silence.  Then acknowledging.  Then, "Brain overload."

  "That's a thing?"

  "It is."

  "Let's go eat."

  "And I want tea.  This weather is terribly dry."

  My own brain searched for meaning in what she'd said.  That happens sometimes around an enormous intellect.  And it happens when culture presses in wanting something, or bulldozing something, or it's missing something.  Then I get on meaning detail, try and match every waking thought to "it"--meaning.  "Ah, but what is meaning?" A philosophy professor had once asked just as

  I could see meaning in the shifts.  It didn't always fare like dictionary words.

  "What does it matter?"

  "Who said it?"

  "WHY does that matter?"

  "WHO said it?"

  "Maybe try a different pronoun question."

  "NO."

  "WHO?"

  "WHY?"

  I'd dreamt, thirty, forty years later, making it to Seattle, and demanding the flannels back from "Grunge".  Had fallen asleep to an imaginary debate about sitcoms.  Is the AI funnier?