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')