Monday, January 26, 2015

lights

A new alignment of days. Embracing change as constant, embracing time as cyclical, as a spinning wheel. I feel spring in the day today-- it is the same spring that usually graces Brooklyn weekend mornings-- it is a recognition of grace that streams over the tops of Greenpoint brownstones, sun shafts that catch the walker regularly, light paint that washes through cracks between buildings.

I can recognize each thing in my days-- each light-prism moment. I can see each thing and pluck it out of my running days here. I can capture and save it-- savor it from the wash of grey days. I can walk in the sun here, and think about the blizzard there. I am building a scaffold. I write about the same things over and over again. I am trapped in the run-on sentences of my childhood. But it is different this time. I am building a cage for future thoughts. I am tired of them flying away in the breeze, I am building a geodesic dome to the sky. I am holding myself responsible for my thoughts, holding myself as the keeper of my own daydreams.

The things we are drawn to are portents, we open passageways to constellations by seeing them. We can be sensitized film for light paint. There is always CO street light in shades of dust, blue, and dried leaves. I would recognize this CO light first-- the particles that bathed my shape as a child, growing up in blue and brown, in sun. It is dusty motes of afternoon in thick antique shops-- anger dreams in windowsills, old screen doors breathing in August heat. 

CO light is more clear and icy blue than the earth dust of NM. It is more crystalline and quiet than the spirit sparks of Santa Fe mornings. NM air rings. Santa Fe is the high desert and sounds can carry for miles. The smells smudge the air there in vertical stripes-- rainwater through sage, chamisa clouds in air-- the smell of yellow.

Marfa, TX has a quietness and softness in the air that still pulls my heartstrings taut-- it is the sounds of mourning doves on the phone lines, and the smell of carob as the water hits the earth. I can't go back there yet. I can write and remember the splinter thin scaffold of thought structures, I can say that poetry grows there, the most bare bone brittle thin wires of thought make sense only there. There is a lack of sensory noise. It is heartbreaking. But only in this clarity can I picture the contours of my own heart, my lungs breathing dust in and crystals out. I am always trying to understand how crystals grow.

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