I think this was the hawk that chase left on our doorstep as a strange homecoming present. He found it on the side of the highway, where it had maybe fallen from the electrical wires overhead. He had been out jogging, and was kind enough to explain the gift, before I stuck my head, full, into the black plastic bag. Enterprising Sam figured out a way to remove the beautiful wings, and hung them, framed on our wall. He left the body of the bird in the field next to our house. I iwsh he could find the poem he wrote about the hawk, because it was beautiful, and I remember seeing the color gold when I read it. spring, 2009, marfa, tx

brine

1.
memories are cobblestones;

like teeth in the earth.

they come at us from four sides of consciousness:
as the embedded thing in mud,
as the adobe bricks steaming in the rain,
as the smoke from the distant storm,
as the sour yellow smell of wet chamisa rises from the plain.

2.
adobe houses have a tendency to cluster themselves together wetly in storms.
the lashes of rain darken even the red dust under trucks and rusted car shells.

iron and creosote hang heavy in the air as
metallic wet steel wool
coagulates inside the larger particles of storm wind,
nestled into its made nest.

wet brine of a West Texas afternoon,
breath of the backyard through the open window, reading quietly,
chicken stock bubbling on the stove.

copyright Elizabeth Griswold 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016.

prism 2

crossed green blades curl under
the soaped fabric of morning air:
the traced green lace
of evergreen branches hangs down.

sirens and train whistles break
the washed swath of sideways wind,
as the round bells of birdcalls
ring silver in the lemon-colored air.

(i am weary today), content to
watch the world as fractured slivers of yellow and green light:
splintered into a charcoal geometry of off-square lit windows, wire fence rungs,
and the small-mesh kaleidescope of an open screen door.

Rainstorm

It rained last night-- suddenly and full of lightning sparks.
The backyard was lit up in torrential, tropical wedges.
There was an unnatural greenness to this scene, (shreds of dreams still hanging over my eyelids).

When we sleep down here, it is with wildness over our heads;
a windscreen separates
out from in with a loose and quiet flapping,
a dark sound barely heard in our sleep.

Our house is surrounded by trees and bushes on all sides, a sort of white shell amongst arid desert dirt.
By day you might call the backyard a wasteland of hot weeded space.
At night the smells and sounds become tropical and green.

Combine the tropical with the local.

Texas vocabularies of snakes and desert willows, wrapped
in the lush greenness of Bahian cacao groves—life on a tropical plantation has always seemed ideal to me.

Sleeping through the hottest part of the day,
breakfast in an aerie cliff room of warm coffee (milk, fruit, porridge),
dollhouse rooms, shaded courtyards, vines of clematis and bougainvilla, distant calls of birds reaching over a tropical canopy.

Last night the lightning storm fell on us unexpectedly, with brilliant flashes and cracks of thunder. In my half-sleep dreamstate I was happiest to drift between sensations—
the smell of rain,
the sound of it hitting the dry dirt like small stones,
the sound of it running hard against the house, and
the blank, black softness of ruffled sleep.

The lightning called a ridged wakefulness out of the dark like a quiet mushroom uncovered. My night musings had wrapped around themselves, ends firing blankly like lit fuses (cut wires), tentacles absorbed in each other.

Simultaneous appreciation of opposites brings out the best in each—from a bare nest of bunched blankets, (my childhood front porch perch), grew an understanding of the thunderstorms that rolled in like fields of wet gray wool (sparking loudly) over vast front plains.

rock list

There is a spot in my chest, when pressed, that tells me to gather all still and thin-pricked moments from my past and press them together, coagulating wetly in their fresh glue, shining and lacquered as any white-glazed structure, (a church spire seen over a distant hill).

The small bone voice tells me:

Firstly, that pieces of experience un-examined rattle away like marbles indefinitely in a cage. They must be recombined into a uniform, if scaffolded matrix (something like the shell of an egg seen magnified 200 times).

Secondly, it might do me well to better my scientific vocabulary (the chemistry of binding things, wet seals, connective tissue, white hairy strands)

Thirdly, do not be afraid to gather images like rocks across a path, and present them (wrapped shards) as a list.

1.wheat
2.black lava rock with embedded crystals
3.bright strawberry fruit
4.yellow gelatin sunlight
5.melon seeds wrapped in their pack
5.bird-calls like waves on a black beach
6.yellow light on their shaggy coats

sass

sass,
expanding feeling of loss,
rising from my chest

fuss,
kicking covers off me in the morning
birds weave canopy of sound
around me

i spitefully water the tomato plants.

how do cities grow?
as an organism with parts that (slow) connect to form a body?

growth (inside or out)
in: personal movement through space, tracks of transportation

processional: p. 105 Trachtenberg

113 Trac. “thickening”
114 nodal points (emptying and filling)
skeleton parts (railroads, roads, transportation, freeways, mail routes?)

personal:
job: trajectory (Biddy Mason, etc)
memory (‘visible residue’, invisible legacies)
personally relevant history/passage through specific landscape (LA), only recorded in memory when it really engages you
p. 153 Hayden
processional, ritualistic

out: grid

116 Trac.
rule of real estate over communal

*118 Trac*
overarching grid “inflicted on the body of the city”

city never a still finished thing (The Republic);

vibrational,

forever a passage.

barn swallow keeps coming into
my studio
perched on the door
looking
for a place to build a nest.

chimes

old record covers
channel
our past.

how else to explain them,
lined dimly in their cardboard box
appearing from nothing,
from no-sign, last week,
under the dust and greased old tupperware
of this town?

"i must have loved you in another life"....

a lost life of old linen and sun in the morning,
hanging laundry on a line
looking sidelong into
a rocky mountain breeze.

it doesn't pay to be so worked up, so knotted,
so twined around interior cords.
the sound of wind coming up the slope is enough to stop the birds
from twittering.
(i let it all go like scattered seeds for birds).

far-off wind chimes, close clock ticking,
branches changing their shade tracery on the wall outside my studio,
these things are obvious, but
must be carefully noted.

i think they are trying to tell me something.

evergreen

birds gurgling
songs
christian praise music infiltrates under my walls
why must they have their transcendent adolescent awakening in the backyard next to mine??

i watered the yard just now
have cut my knuckles without knowing it,
am alternately
tense, constricted
and vast, open amorphous.

my writing house is yellow,
yellow orange cream with blond wood,
like the thick lacquered photo of a desert mountain range that sits propped against the old air conditioner.

i take pleasure in being casual,
curt, effortless.

the birds in the pecan tree are loud swirls of concentric song.
(i'd recognize those chord structures anywhere, isn't the birdsong praise enough???)

i am content to turn my inside thoughts to physical details like lighter yellow paint on dark, like sun window growing larger each minute of the morning, like sun on the back of my neck, like sprays of water catching light as they hit the side of the house.

i am excited that we have hedges of desert rose,
rosemary plants growing under the dryer exhaust,
cherry trees blooming in a dust yard.

i am glad that we have five screen doors to our name,
and that i can open them in progression
safe succession every morning,
on the whims of the indoor cat
who wants a view outside but remains hidden and curled into a pool of wood-grain sunspots.

the dueling melodies are painful,
how long will this project of charity go on????

as i walk through the yard, i kick old husks of pecan shells, pebbles, and break a last trail through evergreen sap,
raining quietly down from the trees.

thrift

national geographic april 1965
'appomattox'
'brittany'
'new york fair'
'man-in-sea'

suitcase record player,
stack of beloved country records,
'music for dining' in green,
candle-wax spray on the table-top (milky-white),
wine-stain,(blood-red rings on wood-grain),
.

if i make the right list
i can reconstruct the occasion
of objects, who lived-out their wooden life in old(er) atmosphere,

i can raise their ghosts if i want to,
and plug the holes that were left by now-dissapated clouds.

the other night, my things
exuded colors like lamps,
(shades of):
green jealousy,
yellow claustrophobia,
red anger
white clarity.

i don't know what i am trying to say
but i know it has something to do with the light;
milky-rain light of today,
cold wet light of driven-through fog on the highway to alpine,
broken bottle light of mason jars like castanets.

if i understood the quality of this light falling,
cloud-like (first cloud: pikes peak, colorado, more fluffy, less wet),
maybe i could find myself pin-pricked within it,
headlights through fog,
fast appearing and carrying stains of rain on the pavement behind,

or evergreen-tops,
fast spires spinning like green corkscrews,
as we rode by them in loud ferries.

in here it is face-blast-space-heater and dryer hum,
a nostalgia of sound:
zipper thwack on metal drum,
static electric sound of childhood,
(like dishwasher sounds it puts me to sleep).

how little could i leave?
what husk would tell the real story,
the inside tale,
the detritus-key-map-decoder (trailed)?

are the things we find in dusty thrift stores any indications of our real life?

dusted

stillness and wildness in inverse proportion-- the wide spaces here are stretched, they pull at your insides. i want to hide the vastness of this experience in the shells of the mundane. we slip easily out of these day-skins each night, and leave them husked beside our beds. what does it mean to be a permeable body? to be a wide filter that catches things in the breeze?

as i was hanging my laundry on the back-yard line the smell of pine resin drifted down from the trees. it is beautiful and sharp, and reminiscent of my rocky mountain childhood. what does it mean, to have one scent blow through another body? to have the essence of pine infiltrate clean linen, to have yellow indian curry powder color the inside of my suitcase and front covers of books, to have creosote oil sit lightly on the air, to blow through white linen sheets in the bedroom?

now i sit breathing ground coffee in the air from a blue plastic cup, smell wet rosemary and dryer heat hum, hear doves and the shakiness of my own body, here, still getting adjusted, still fragile, and off balance, distracted but sharply attuned to every small shock and vibration of this desert house life. i am thinking about lists, and skeleton-structure, dusty pathways through adobe streets, paths of memory, birdcalls, unseen lenses into a smaller part of life (higher magnification). i am looking for stillness, and like a compass or barometer, trying to settle myself at a still point, re-orientation in a known place, new-life in a place that is saturated with colors and smells of an older life.

even the dust here seems holy, like cinnamon particles in the wind, like juniper berries ground, like prairie dust rising from earth. this life must be a sieve-- and i need to learn to see it, soft-focus on the mechanism of capture to strained particles out of the air: mixed gravel, flakes of mica, particles of mica in schist, powder-residue-lacquer-coated spring breeze.

snow

its snowing on my last night in new york.
the snow has massed quietly while i slept.

when i say 'snow', you know that i mean 'sad',
when i say 'me', you know that i mean 'us'.

in the twilight slick hours of before-morning,
i hold on to what I can own;

snow has grown on the slim windowsill ledge like pulled cottonwhite skeins--
inhospitable shelf,
powder-lacquer,

my lamp must glow from the inside room,
watched from the threads of the outside storm.

chestnut hum

1.
the space between the dirt and the grass-tops
is brown,

the color of watered coffee,
one-coat-too-few;

shade paint.


2.
the brown is flecked with grey--
flint sparks

studded with the
dull copper rasp of
unseen insects.


3.
between the layers
of loam and seedtop
run taut
clear threads:

compressed,
wavering,
corded:

interlaced fingers turned upwards like a cage
(inverted birdwings).


4.
i am leaving new york,
and i see the signs everywhere.

the imprint of wings and grass are on the air
swept wings through residue,

bladed shadows
mimic the original.

birdstalk

grackles
walk the courthouse lawn,
looking sidelong
(yellow pupils white iris)

blue-black ballgown trails behind them in the grass.

sandpiper-like birds

early morning reading:

sanderling,
ruddy turnstone,
red knot,
ruff winter plumage,
ruddy turnstone winter plumage,
upland sandpiper.

willet,
dunlin,
whimbrel,
lesser yellowlegs,
short-billed dowitcher,
long-billed curlew,
greater yellowlegs,
hudsonian godwit,
and
black-necked stilt


(next up: the boat-tailed grackle: tail very long and keel-shaped; 3 or 4 pale blue eggs, spotted and scrawled with brown and purple, in a bulky cup of grass, mud, and decayed vegetation placed from 2 to 10' up in marsh grass or bushes).

house (reworked, in robert creeley-like format )

1.
bee hum
they have overtaken the tree
and scrapped evergreen shavings
onto the baked comb
of earth.

the afternoon is
flat in a white heat
(poems out of anger are best sometimes)
broiled, (em)broiled,
charged with sharpness like flaked stone.


2.
i pried the organs gently
out of a still-frozen chicken this afternoon;
ice slick film coating the skin,
soft chisel of fingernails secretly working.

i worried the pieces from the ribcage inside,
the red flesh flaked and banded like quartz.

i held the pieces in my closed fist until the pan was hot enough to throw them into.

the small heart looked
like a wax model of the thing:
tiny grey cord reaching up
aorta slight but unwavering,
waxy under the slough and slosh of floury water.


3.
the bees didn't seem to mind the slick chicken smell that wafted around their hive tree (from inside).
even a tight white drum of a house has small leaks,
like fissures (slow) grown in rock.
air currents and stock smells find their way through,

air-balloon striates when blown too big,
white stretch-marks bloom in grey ground,
(slumped accordians wheezing).


4.
our house is a pliant membrane of brick and wash:
in with filmed skin breath,
out in porous wet trade,
lung-dust and chalk coughed upwards from the sub-floor,
(secrets have gathered like fallen nail-clippings).

audible inhale under pinprick of stars,
fallen exhale like dusk descending on sharp hills.

house

bee hum
they have overtaken the tree
and scrapped evergreen shavings
onto the baked comb
of earth.

the afternoon is
flat in a white heat
(poems out of anger are best sometimes)
broiled, (em)broiled,
charged with sharpness like flaked stone.

i pried the organs gently
out of a still-frozen chicken this afternoon;
ice slick film coating the skin,
soft chisel of fingernails secretly working.

i worried the pieces from the ribcage inside,
the red flesh flaked and banded like quartz.

i held the pieces in my closed fist until the pan was hot enough to throw them into.

the small heart looked
like a wax model of the thing:
tiny grey cord reaching up
aorta slight but unwavering,
waxy under the slough and slosh of floury water.

the bees didn't seem to mind the slick chicken smell that wafted around their hive tree (from inside).
even a tight white drum of a house has small leaks,
like fissures (slow) grown in rock.
air currents and stock smells find their way through,

air-balloon striates when blown too big,
white stretch-marks bloom in grey ground,
(slumped accordians wheezing).

our house is a pliant membrane of brick and wash:
in with filmed skin breath,
out in porous wet trade,
lung-dust and chalk coughed upwards from the sub-floor,
(secrets have gathered like fallen nail-clippings).

audible inhale under pinprick of stars,
fallen exhale like dusk descending on sharp hills.

'travel' by seamus heaney

Oxen supporting their heads
into the afternoon sun,
melons studding the hill like brass:

who reads into distances reads
beyond us, sleeping children
and the dust settling in scorched grass.

afternoon

tomato juice
sun
bees
yellow shelves
birdcalls
largest crow
leaking afternoon light
clock tick
tock
smote (smite).

blue polished rippled stone
quiet hinge
right

in the middle

of the afternoon.


held breath stitch step

and then my head falls forward
again falls over into the end of the day.

knit bone

What comes out of something stripped?

What tracery leaks from calcified things?

Exposing bone to air is unnatural (after-natural), maybe we were not meant to see inside the skin-- to lift cut flaps from their stitched fibers? What happens to us (body) as we look into bone?

The magnified pattern of bone/cartilage looks sponge-like-- soft, knitted, husked, but quietly grown.

dusk walk

recently collected objects: half-pressed (one side flat, one rounded) tangle of tumbleweed, two red-striated scraps of rock (marbled), a bare branch sprung into white bloom (small, hollow-husked) dropped into tabletop hole, a whorled piece of thick green glass (lens) packed with dirt on the back side, and a last rising succession of mourning doves out of power line grid, (traced in order, loudly, coldly, above our stone-kicking feet).

new

I found an old remnant of writing this morning (reworked a bit, below), and can barely remember writing it. It's uncanny how things, once articulated, have a way of making themselves true. The wish of a dry and dusty desert landscape life has always threaded itself through my day-to-day life, (under-conscious hazy cloud backdrop), but never have the details (once specified, thrown into the wind) so obviously become the track that my life runs along.


'I am ready for that open space I have always looked for. I am ready to face a landscape that is bare, windblown, sparse, and scrubbed. I am ready to face the wind on sharp intake as I come around the side of the trailer-- I am ready for the scratches and dark hollows under my own eyes. I am ready to turn into something new, into something old, something that I was in my own mind before anyone else saw it coming. I am ready for red dust on my skirt, and jeans and off-white velvet sweatshirts stretched thin. I am ready for the lonesome whistle of wind, for distant train calls, for sharp corners that recede into infinity, for blue sky and yellow earth. I can examine these things now, and think to myself that they are strange, I am strange, I have been building an arsenal of vocabulary and voice, of tumbled, shorn bits of words that make sense now in their new combinations. I have been collecting bits of stone and rock, in each pocket they click together, hanging down at the lowest part, against my leg from the inside. I have been collecting these bits, pieces, flakes, scraps, and now I can string them together into a new alphabet.'

I once admired a (textile) artist in Seattle who went on walks around the area collecting small objects. When she got home she arranged these objects into a new personal lexicon for herself-- each thing a letter-- their groupings turned haphazard into poetry. (In art school I made a board game like this once-- a player would arrange objects onto a haiku pattern grid, spin a spinner that linked object with word-- I think I called it the "random poetry generator"??? Not many people could appreciate the subtleties of haiku (you were supposed to write it down and take it with you!) that centered on recurring words like 'taxidermy', 'neon bar sign','smoke','darkness', and 'dirty ashtray'.....)

I am tired of ideas around the edges... am tired of skimming the surface of things, of exploring the safe remnants around the edge. If I were to go to the heart of the matter would it seem scary? Is the process different, would it seem too big-- would I be able to recognize my ideas from the center, instead of noticing their outside contours first?

These are questions I hope to answer from the desert....

Last night I dreamed of mountains, greenhouses, castles, and snow. I read somewhere that when you dream of exploring buildings, houses you are really examining the twisting passageways of your own brain. It is a strange place indeed, I had been to some of these places in dreams before but I had never been able to access certain parts of the landscape-- now suddenly I was "behind the walls"... a pathway in/through. I have been reading John Updike like mad lately-- an image of a green house from yesterday lodged in my brain-- at the time I thought "there's my novel".... how strange. Of course the ideas would be housed (dark green painted walls and wood trim), cold and creaky wooden house, cold but full of books... steps up to another story... I'd like to hold on to this shell of story. I know I will recognize it when I see it again.

house

Snowing softly outside my bedroom window, my room a tangled mass of color and sparkled glints of fabric, books. I am enjoying it today... the muddle and mess... the soft breathing of the things I have collected. I am enjoying them now, as they will be replaced soon enough, by clarity, sparcity, by open plain.

As I was reading the poem below, I found something in it-- something I cannot quite articulate, but that corresponds to me, to my life. Actually it is a shadowy recurring dream that I have sometimes, a dream of a house, the front sort of half-room entrance way (portal) of a dark Park Hill Denver house... It is soft afternoon, and that is all. It is afternoon, and the particles of air have congealed into a dusty thick cloud inside the house. It is afternnon, but it means something, it is quiet as steps on thick plush carpet, but there is a sort of waiting, a hush, that time of day that turns to something else. It is shadowy, dim and mauve grey, warm grey, house thick with upholstered quiet things, layers of rugs on top of carpets, window out to a shady green evergreen shade, cold fragrant shade. I think it is the time of afternoon when the children walk home from school. I have always recognized this place, a feeling of peace in a house, (dim mix with green nostalgia), to be inside looking out through softness, into a gathering dusk-light thick particles of air like stirred pea soup.

The House on Bishop Street (rita dove)

No front yard to speak of,
just a porch cantilevered on faith
where she arranged the canary's cage.
The house stayed dark all year
though there was instant light and water.

(No more gas jets hissing,

their flicker glinting off
Anna Rettich's midwife spectacles
as she whispered 'think a baby'
and the babies came.) Spring
brought a whiff of cherries, the kind
you boiled for hours in sugar and cloves

from the yard of the Jewish family next door.
Yumanski refused to speak so
she never bought his vegetables
at the Canal Street Market. Gertrude,
his youngest and blondest,
slipped by mornings for bacon and grits.
There were summer floods and mildew

humming through fringe, there was
a picture of a ship she passed
on her way to the porch, strangers calling
from the street 'Ma'am, your bird
shore can sing!' If she leaned out she could glimpse
the faintest of mauve-- no more than an idea--
growing just behind the last houses.

(from 'Thomas and Beulah')

milk light

I remember
certain kinds of light
that belong only
to old days

basement book days
underground stone days

humming disks of light
roaming hallways
pooling in church corridors
seeping under office doors

like
spilt
yellow milk.

roebling tea room

'el gaucho' mate tea
reminds me of Christmasses
I did not have.

cardamom on my tongue
green bitter seed
spice hangs in the air
like evergreen smoke.

writing out of sadness
turns inward like a screw,
wooden heart
choking,
coughs dust.

the solid-dirty-grain of the table is the only reality.

AMNH wall tag

Birds of the Pampas
Lake Chascomus, near Buenos Aires, Argentina

Chilean flamingo, black-necked swan and the southern screamer, called by Hudson "that clarion-voiced watch-bird of the night."

anne carson, 'the beauty of the husband'

.................
for what is more true

than a snowy night, down it comes
sifting over branches and railings and the secret air itself,
down the steep, down the stops, down the deepenings, down the grooves in the nails.
They fall asleep and dream
of muffled corridors,
greenish glow
along the edges of mirrors, faces, cities.
Snow spins over it, down over it all.

(xviii, 80)

"hold on"

I steal
bobby-pins and sugar
and creep
back.

Drown out the sounds of talk
with music
that scatters my thoughts like a glass dropped.

"Sailing to shores of white sand"
"Sinking to the muddy bottom"
I trade these for the other, and dream of a time when I will be able to hear them again,

when music will fill up my house like a tight brown drum.

lilac smell

This morning I wake
Silently, stealth, cat-like
Into a dirty morning
Aching, squinting, blind.

New York is wastrul.
I'm not even sure if that's a word (but it was running in my head).
It is the only word that seems to capture something
About the deadness, and waste slack fitfulness
The light here too bright, outlines bottles of pills and book spines
with ragged impunity at their content, their worth.

My sentences leave me like birds.
Distant scratchings before I can capture them.
I wake, with a toy animal clutched to my heart,
Central lozenge pill-box
Head between the two pillows like a child.

I used to go into my parents room after they got up
And lie in their bed
Center exact straightened

I had to lie just so with the covers pulled exactly straight to my chin
To see the angels in the yard
Bright flames blond angels that lived in our lilac trees.

That's how my mom knew I was special.
Because I had conversations with them each morning as the sun stripped the leaves of dew
Starched washed clean golden light
That poured silently into the room
with that purple lilac smell.

They told me to lie still as a pill-box.

"winter's come and gone" gillian welch!

Oh little red bird
Come to my window sill
Been so lonesome
Shaking that morning chill
Oh little red bird
Open your mouth and say
Been so lonesome
Just about flown away
So long now I've been out
In the rain and snow
But winter's come and gone
A little bird told me so
Oh little blue bird
Pearly feather breast
Five cold nickels all I got left
Oh little blue bird
What am I gonna do
Five cold nickels
Ain't gonna see me through
So long now I've been out
In the rain and snow
But winter's come and gone
A little bird told me so
Oh little black bird
On my wire line
Dark as trouble
In this heart of mine
Poor little black bird
Sings a worried song
Dark as trouble
'Til winter's come and gone
So long now I've been out
In the rain and snow
But winter's come and gone
A little bird told me so
So long now I've been out
In the rain and snow
But winter's come and gone
A little bird told me so

notes for a poem

afternoon blue light
silver light
reflected cold (seen from within)
warm lamp-light
france medieval stone cobblestone courtyard
snow but blue snow
reflections all tarnished silver pewter dull sheen
not bright
hearth glow.

countdown

18.

more shifts
sitting ice-cold
in a dimly lit east village wine shop.

(coldest sigh).

countdown

44.

(days)

(in new york)

(listening to gossip through walls).

barred

barred, cage-like
tremulous.

how was it that someone else thought of 'clotted' yesterday before me?

yesterday i:
"lived in a tangle" (r. ducornet)
in a:
"knot of twinging turf" (y.winters)
in the:
"clotting cold." (y. winters)

frozen ice-in-air, dissapointment
said sang-froid blood cold
break it off like brittle
frozen yet not always so frigid
anger
steam that evaporates in front of my own mouth
i never realized that anger could be packed into words like clay
like thrown clay that is laced with small stones.

i remember throwing some of the most beautiful raw rough red clay vessels
they rose magically in my hands because the clay was so loose in itself
like sandpaper too
the small stones cut my hands
so quickly i didn't feel it happening
until after when i was running them under cold water in a dirty classroom sink.

the new wet vessels
stood on the wood-grain folding table like slumped soldiers
like melting towers
like crennelated and pierced desert formations.

i tried to explain to my class how they were supposed to represent moorish north african architecture
with its seamless push between earth and structure
sacred signs whitewashed on walls
rock adobe bone dried clay
mudded

my teacher attacked my technique
said they were not big enough
he wondered aloud if i had what it takes for a challenging undergraduate art program.

he said i lacked discipline.
then shuffled off in clogs
that were too big for him
making his legs contort inwards to hold them on his feet
trailing chalk and clay dust behind him.

he watched quietly as i packed the vessels into the back of my car.

quartz

tangled postings sheets sun on sheets. anger, at what? starting again today, getting in the right frame of mind today, already out of sorts... dreams of barking dogs, something else that woke me shocked awake (can't remember). tired of cold, tired of bed, tired of frozen lungs.

my shoulders are tired of remaining as hunched, bird-claws clenched, ribcage breath...

i know i need to adjust the surroundings, change to new, escape!

even the screen is flecked with ice.

i see helicopters and sun, they are towing the plane that flew into the hudson yesterday. i can't see this, but i know it is happening. the plane looked like a small bird that flew into the water... and people standing on the wings, like children, or penguins clustered. what is it that allows us to connect with anonymous tragedy, almost tragedy, the what-if or almost-was. i usually sit over the wing, i usually sit in the exit row. i wonder if i would have been able to lift the plane door and throw it , heavy, into a cold sea. i like to think that something like this "wakes me up" or "reminds me what is important". what it really signifies is a disconnect in my own life-- the desperate need for me to plug back in to my own life-- bone intimacy and ropes of hot blood. we only have so many rituals that allow us to feel alive, like animals i suppose.

i'd like to feel my body in the early morning desert sun. i'd like to feel shafts of light around my face, my skull, to bathe myself in a landscape that is mostly dust but crystalline-- solidified shell but translucent,

quartz.

Yvor Winters

I was sitting here, listening to the hum of my electric baseboard heater, watching the smoke imprint the frozen air outside-- the down feather factory still processes its feathers in full oily brooklyn glory. I wrote a poem ('smokestack')! I can just see the edge of the smoke, the bottom, its "source", wispy blown. The strange thing-- the MINUTE I finished the poem, the smoke stopped (as if it had never been there). Its going again now, but I think it is different smoke. My room is the only warm one in the house. I hear distant music and traffic. I feel the cold from outside. I am safe and warm with smoke-view, lamp-view, book-view.

I started taking notes on a poem I want to write tomorrow-- to keep the incoporated themes of glass (filament, spun, sugar, wire, bent hair) and add to it glass-pane transparency, also filament fiber-opticks, sea-creatures... Also I was pleased with the use of words like webbed, fringed, edged, laced.... and thinking about them.

I stated reading Yvor Winters (1900-1968). (Sam and I found some records of him reading his poetry aloud, this was one of our christmas presents to ourselves). As I was reading I began to wonder which deserts Winters had spent time in, he mentions a blue lake, a "canyon, among the mountains," might this be Taos? I was just about to start researching this when I read his next poem:

'The Solitude of Glass' (!!!!!!!)

No ferns, but
Fringed rock (!!!!!)
Spreads on hills
To cover us.

On stone of pollen
At the bend of sight
Stiff rocks
Cast violet eyes

Like rays of shadow,
Roam
Impenetrable
In a cold of glass--

The sun, a lichen
Spreading on the sky
For days
Behind the cold;

The burros,
Like iron-filings
Gathered to
The adamant.

(............................................)

smokestack

the steam is rising in nets
like caul.

upward thrust of matrix-turned-sideways
expanding from a cone-shaped base
concentrically (blown).

upwards net like spun glass
edges laced with frilled foam
filament clusters caught.

edges smoke
blistered back-to-itself

seep of rising foam in ice-cold air
fringed with crystals
and webbed crispness grown.



(elizabeth griswold 1.15.2009 brooklyn.)

Exmoor

by Amy Clampitt (from 'The Kingfisher')

Lost aboard the roll of Kodac-
olor that was to have super-
seded all need to remember
Somerset were: a large flock

of winter-bedcover-thick-
pelted sheep up on the moor;
a stile, a church spire,
and an excess, at Porlock,

of tenderly barbarous antique
thatch in tandem with flower-
beds, relentlessly pictur-
esque, along every sidewalk;

a millwheel; and a millbrook
running down brown as beer.
Exempt from the disaster,
however, as either too quick

or too subtle to put on rec-
ord, were these: the flutter
of, beside that brown water,
with a butterfly-like flick

of fan-wings, a bright black-
and-yellow wagtail; at Dulver-
ton on the moor, the flavor
of the hot toasted teacake

drowning in melted butter
we had along with a bus-tour-
load of old people; the driver

's way of smothering every r
in the wool of a West Countr-
y diphthong, and as a Somer-

set man, the warmth he had for
the high, wild, heather-
dank wold he drove us over.

goodbye new york

This morning I am eating steaming hot microwave sausage, and drinking flowery French black tea (with milk and brown sugar). The tea is called Mariage Freres 'Marco Polo', and comes in the most beautiful black and yellow tin. In France you can buy this tea in bulk at a miniscule store in the Marais, just try not to "accidentally" order a rare Chinese breakfast tea that will cost you 20 euro for a small bag.

The sun is streaming in my window-- I am wrapped in blankets, it is around 10 degrees in New York today. I am enjoying my last January here in this apartment-- I have made the decision to leave in March. I know this is the right decision because I woke up this morning as a newer, much lighter body--(head stretched to the wall, lazy feet diagonal). It feels good to stretch against this perimeter of fear that surrounds me in this-- the shock of doing something that is pure action-- active, new, and fully NOW.

At this present moment I cling to myself, and my work. This is one of the first times that my work/research has been the sustaining thing in my life. I don't know why I was holding on to the idea of this apartment being my constant (close on 3 years), what will really hold me up is the web of knowledge and poetic scraps, books, articles, thought screens/scaffolds that I have built up these past three years for myself. I was looking at my school transcript yesterday. For the last two years I have gotten straight A's (minus one B+), in NYC Art History GRAD school.

When I think about the ways I have taken my assignments, papers, tasks and expanded them to overlap with each other, and my continuing interests, I am so proud of myself. I have studied Japonisme at the turn of the century in silver vessels, English art pottery of the inter-War years, environmentally "friendly" and healthy houses in California (house as membrane), the Pueblo photographs of Laura Gilpin around Taos, NM, earthships, colonial landcape history all over our country from the 1500's on, French green arsenic-dyed wallpaper from 1715, rococo, Italian landscape and palace design of the 16th century, Renaissance gem and mineral collecting, old lapidary and medical texts, fold-out German anatomy books, Persian miniatures, Delacroix's watercolor sketches and journals from Morocco, Orientalism, Foucault, Said, Homi Bhaba, Shazia Sikander, the designs of IDEO, 16th-17th century French palaces and country houses, Boulle furniture and clocks, natural history dioramas!!!!!!

How does it happen that we start to own what we have studied? It becomes such a seamless, interwoven part of our own being it is hard to separate the strands from the fabric-- one from another. I guess I always have lived in my head-- but it seems to me the best writers are the ones that can identify each their own thought process and most accurately dumbly roughly dull-wittedly capture a coherent strain of this thought. To be comfortable with each and every current silly passing superficial or awkward thing that I write should slowly accelerate the timbre and polished quality of my own personal voice. I want to practice this, and become at ease with each flitting passing random profound facet of thought.

I am wrapped in brown flannel sheets that, admittedly, need to be washed. I really am too cold, and too languidly at ease with the books around my head (spread like caught insects on my bedspread) for this to happen. The walk from my apartment to the laundromat is not a long one, but it can be a humiliating one, walking past the bodegas trailing pink sheets and towels. It also takes some backbone emotional resolve to get (always) stuck waiting at the traffic light-- making awkward somewhat fearful eye-contact with the drivers of screaming semi-trucks rounding the corner of our block.

I am simmering small green french lentils on the stove, in my seasoned cast-iron pan. I cut up three huge cloves of garlic, half a white onion, one small tomato, and deglazed with a healthy dose of old white cooking wine, a dash of sherry and some deep amber colored chicken stock. It makes me feel so calm to have this cooking slowly on the stove, turning itself magically into a meal (maybe with a hard boiled egg on the side, lots of coarse sea salt and black pepper).

I may have been inspired by the A.J. Liebling book, 'Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris' that I am reading this morning, also the two Colette novels I just finished. Also, ever-present in my mind is the rising mirage of a far West Texas kitchen, with windows out to the backyard/desert/sky. The first thing I noticed about this kitchen were old-fashioned glassed shallow cupboards for dishes. I knew that my gold striped glassware would fit perfectly. The dish obsession has died down, I am down to essential remnants now. For Christmas Sam gave me a whole set of Japanese inspired china-- white with small pine cones and needles. There is a tall coffee pot and ornate small coffee cups. These will be perfect, and new. I can picture them lined in the cupboards, just so, like stiff but hopeful friends.....

(happy long sigh).

colette

In the house a lamp behind the sitting-room window suddenly glows red and the Little One shivers. All that had looked green up to the moment before, now turns blue around this motionless red flame. The child's hand, trailing in the grass, is suddenly aware of the evening damp. It is the hour of lamps. Leaves rustle together with a sound like the plash of running water and the door of the hayloft flaps against the wall as it does in a winter gale. ('my mother's house', 24)