cut all of my pictures in half........

walt whitman

Cowslip and shad-blow, flaked like tethered foam
Around bared teeth of stallions, bloomed that spring
When I first read the lines, rife as the loam
Of prairies, yet like breakers cliffward leaping!
....My hand
in yours,
(Hart Crane, 'The Bridge')



Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten,
Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide,
Miles walking, the sound of breaking waves, the other side of me,
Paumanok there and then I thought the old thought of likenesses,
These you presented to me you fish-shaped island...
('Sea Drift')

winter

In between the warm pages of cooking magazines, and holiday catalogs, i sit for a minute and breathe into a part of this poem......

'black buttercups'

"in march, the farmer's month
for packing up and moving on, the rutted
mud potholed with glare, the verb 'to move'
connoted nothing natural, such as the shifting
of the course of streams or of the sun's
position, sap moving up, or even,
couples dancing. What the stripped root, exhumed
above the mudhole's brittle skin, discerned
was exile"....

(amy clampitt, from 'what the light was like')

the other sharp and brittle things i am reading in this suddenly cold of cold winters is john berger 'pig earth'--stories and poems from 4 years of living with his family in an alpine peasant village in france-- stories that get at the wisp/heart of oral history, in the shapeshiftng of steam and hearth fire against the country dark. blood is close in these stories, the struggles of animal life and human dependence on these animals for food and warmth. the things i like best are descriptions of the wind at night.....

i have also just devoured the first part of anne carson's 'glass, irony, and god'. looking out at a cold country english moor from warm kitchen.. the sharp edge of love loss.....holes in the earth caked with ice, spiralling downward.

i think it is time for hayden carruth's 'longer poems', maybe some seamus heaney (irish sea salt floured frozen earth). i am in the mood for lists, for obscure strung collections of specific things, plants, bits of flower or stone. i am warm in my brooklyn apartment room, warm from sherry and hard strung chains of words, clicked bone, and shell.

i want to write about leaf mold, moldering, in piles during the wintertime. i want to write about rainbow puddles of dark oil under a van on a dark silver night street. i want to write about mountain winter, and breath, and other powdered things. i want to write about metallic things that are cold, that shine dully, with burnished grey light. i want to write about powdered breath, and moors.

i am warm, but surrounded by strange things. i need simplicity, i am warm, cedar, sherry, sea salt, coastal, and springtime cold. i am winter frost, smoke from the stacks, and heat hum. i am calm st the center of it all, and grateful for the outlines of these things pressed against the soft contours of my body.

i am cold, and quiet, and hopeful, annoyed, and hunched. i am ready for the specificity of my own life, i will remember the details of each plant i see-- yesterday sam and i walked around roosevelt island. i couldn't take my eyes from the tree trunks along the water-- warm copper colored almost violet burnished trunks-- ribbons thick around their base, strung and corded around themselves, but shiny metal underneath the brushstrokes of thin tree fiber. I loved that color, against the cold grey of the city and the dark water... this copper was alight from within, smudged in just the right places, and tarnished just enough to show a soft glow, to throw this burnished glow on us as we walked below. the seagulls fell off of their stoops one by one as we walked by.

denver natural history museum september 2008

late july, 2008

I think it may be
humbleness
that brings us back
to ourselves

humility in the face of sharp wind
round wind
tree rustlings
neighbor laughter

and branches outlined
against a clouded sky

thoughts bearded and furred
are wiped clean
exposed bone
calcified polished bone

(sound of far-off rooster and metal tools on metal spikes)

(highway).

june 30, 2008

I think back to
things
I couldn't possibly remember

the wind brings it back
and the swallows
wheeling
slow overhead

the sound of the wind
at my back
echo of scrubbed earth
far out beyond the
train tracks
and hum of traffic

the wind is exactly behind me
parting my hair

the birds are confetti
sparks
in distant trees
catenary
and the clouds roll
silently like a
screen
being pulled silently taut

i think about my uncle
Rick
staring into the wind scrubbed
Wyoming plain

of distant gray shapes
reflected
I think about being young
about letting go the pressure
to work

to make

to create

i sit and wait for it to come
back to me
rolling in like fog

i let myself be hollow
a watcher
bone and hair
feathered
and quiet

the wind hits the back of my head
like a soft curl
a breath of rain and dust

all sounds are magnified
bird calls punctuate
the soft grey evening air
like commas
sharp beaked cries that cast
a net over our
weeded empty backyard lot

i want the words to spill out
sideways
ribcage polished and spun
empty
save for breath

expanding
funneled
air of
just this place, causing my chest
to expand
contract
expand

rusted red metal armchair
gasoline can
bathtub sunk to its knees, in earth
firewood stacked
leaning tin rotting wood garage
just covers old gold car
exactly

like a skin
painted rocks
blue pink stripes
yellow cactus yucca tree
open lid of sky
scudded with soft clouds swallows
chirp dovetail flying over the face of the wind.

june 23, 2005

of course it wouldn't be
relief
hothouse
steam
pressed wrists in your closed
fists

in the middle of the night sometimes
i wonder if you have extra
hinges
springs
the way you move around me
and sometimes cup my face
in both hands.

monday, june 22, 2008

a morning of birds in the tree
invisible sweet calls
rustlings in the shade
the one that sifts the sand
scrapes his bill (beak) through the dry dusty dirt
looking sideways for bugs.

stereo birds
back door grackles and loud ravens
overtaking the tree
just at the edge of our backyard (louise's)
black heavy gurgled cries
ominous smudges in the branches
impatient harsh cries.

kitchen window
sweet round sound
peacocks.

silver water sounds
movements through the fence
bowl of blood red lava rocks
mismatched children's chairs
wood stump with alabaster ashtray
white birdbath
sunbaked earth
quieter now, the cracks open.

the ants have blocked the
entrance to their hole
with sticks.

june 1, 2008

(retrogrde old marfa writings from this summer 2008............)

Entry #1 of the Summer "Blog":
June 1, 2008

its funny, when we have these moments where we think everything is all ahead of us, that we are indefinately young, we stare out of the classroom window with disdain for the present moment, the teacher in curls and high-pitched voice, the chalk dust in the air.

i remember watching the dust motes in the air outside of my fifth grade classroom window, and the slant of the sun, magic square, and thinking it was an important moment. a moment that congealed, and afternoon Denver sunlight that stiffened and froze, light that became solid through the leaves of the trees.

it seemed all in front of me then, maybe it was second grade, i still remember my teacher's face and the feeling of upcoming escape.

late spring (slanted light!) through trees, reaching to the second floor classroom, crowned.

the quietness of green halls, nurses offices, phones, ringing, empty lockers.

at some point you realize that time catches up, and those still frozen moments of light falling on you are mostly past..

that thickened light that gathers itself in the afternoon, and quietly masses in pools, just under the front door green gold dust specks sunsmote...

particles of dust in sun,,,

i had a dream once that a mantle of light fell on my shoulders, crowning me, in my parents' green living room, flecked with mirrors, and polished wood, 'mantle' and the voice that said it spelled it out...

in the air
i think of words like 'smote, smite,
storm'
and i think of light falling
Caravaggio's 'Conversion of St. Paul'
man struck dumb mute under
sideways horse
bathed in light
sunswept
church bells
manic wind outside the open door
flecks of sun shadows in the
door fast
like the wind tossing the dust in the yard.
white curtains breathing light in and out
bright electric light
church song
dogs peacocks roosters
powerlines
i can hear the hammock turning over.

'a field guide to getting lost'

"“Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves,” said a Tibetan sage six hundred years ago, and the book where I found this edict followed it with an explanation of the word “track” in Tibetan: shul, “a mark that remains after that which made it has passed by—a footprint, for example. In other contexts, shul is used to describe the scarred hollow in the ground where a house once stood, the channel worn through rock where a river runs in flood, the indentation in the grass where an animal slept last night. All of these are shul: the impression of something that used to be there. In this case, such an impression is formed by the indentations, hollows, marks, and scars left by the turbulence of selfish craving.” In Yiddish, shul means a synagogue, but I was trying to send this missing ancestor not to temple but to a path through an uninhabited expanse where heaven seems to come all the way down to your feet." (rebecca solnit, “a field guide to getting lost,” 50-51)

Emil Ludwig, The Nile

The light has broken the silence. A few geese cackle, flying up from a dune to the east above the lake-head, but the white egrets sit motionless in the ambatch. Yonder a solitary grey heron, who has spent the night standing on one leg, makes the first move, draws in his long neck, stretches out his pointed beak, spreads his wings, and flies away low over the water. Soon there is movement everywhere. Sideways-twisted horns sway slowly on a few black heads, suspicious eyes peer into the new light, while a few tufts of hair twitch behind them-- it is a buffalo family, velvety dark, broad-browed, and threatening. (50)

james salter

We dash the black river, its flats smooth as stone. Not a ship, not a dinghy, not one cry of white. The water lies broken, cracked from the wind. This great estuary is wide, endless. The river is brackish, blue with the cold. It passes beneath us blurring. The sea birds hang above it, they wheel, disappear. We flash the wide river, a dream of the past. The deeps fall behind, the bottom is paling the surface, we rush by the shallows, boats beached for winter, desolate piers. And on wings like the gulls, soar up, turn, look back. (light years, not as good as having someone read it aloud to you..........)