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)