DREAM SONG

Sunlight, moonlight,

Twilight, starlight–

Gloaming at the close of day,

And an owl calling,

Cool dews falling

In a wood of oak and may.

Lantern-light, taper-light,

Torchlight, no-light:

Darkness at the shut of day,

And lions roaring,

Their wrath pouring

In wild waste places far away.

Elf-light, bat-light,

Touchwood-light and toad-light,

And the sea a shimmering gloom of grey,

And a small face smiling

In a dream's beguiling

In a world of wonders far away.

 
Walter de la Mare

light

I’d like to speak about light:

desert pearl light,

slanted pastel light,

smoked glass light.

(Please think about these things:

about the fall of light through glass,

about the press of sun through walls,

about adobe steaming in hot sun,

and the silence of desert-above-pine trees in Taos summer).

Coming around the curve,

the lit scene behind us broke jagged into view--

(underwater backdrop, milk haze, watercolor map)--

an Eocene landscape dropped suddenly away from our car.

You froze this panorama picture for me dear,

living stage, wet and moving-in-haze;

you pin-pointed and stuck

the exact moment of landscape coinciding with consciousness in me.

I could hardly turn away from my new bones of painted earth,

edges that abraded like river-banks, worried and slow,

ever-changing overlap of thin skin boundaries.

As a child, I could recite all faerie cosmos happenings in white waterfalls,

could trace smoke constellations onto dark green pine-scrim,

could wait quietly sitting on logs,

sit quietly in wood fire ash and burnt coffee smoke.

Thin film of mountain dust and dirt ash,

I felt tarnished, worked like a copper coin,

burnished under dust,

gold-blessed.

4/22/2010 elg

nest

"Thus the dream house must possess every virtue. How-ever spacious it must also be a cottage, a dove-cote, a nest, a chrysalis. Intimacy needs the heart of a nest. Erasmus, his biographer tells us, was long in "finding a nook in his fine house in which he could put his little body with safety. He ended by confining himself to one room until he could breathe the parched air that was necessary to him.""

I write a lot from bed, and always have. I think Colette did this, perhaps only at the end, when confined to her bed that was pushed alternately to and from the open window, depending on the French season. I find comfort in it.

I keep thinking about Annie Dillard needing to shut the blinds in her studio every day, even though they look out onto beautiful forest land. My blinds are closed, but I think I may need to stop the click-shuttering of memory slides in the back of my head, the colors blur together, I hear them turn over one by one, like my Dad's early first "digital" clock that he dismembered so you could see the numbers turn over on themselves, just the innards of the clock, working away in regular whirring increments, numbers on a spool.

With tests looming, I am trying to calm myself down. I am trying to remember landscapes that opened up around me in my past, places that responded to the immensity of space within me. I am calling up that feeling of response, the first time I drove around the curve of canyon into Taos, NM.

The basin opens up before you as an immeasurable plain, and a kind of vertigo sets in, like being underwater and feeling the shelf of sand drop off darkly and without warning. I am remembering the highway that seemed to have no end, when I first started college, first drive to school in Santa Fe, and I remember thinking "How will this landscape change me"? What will I become here?" Its strange, even at that young age I prioritized the power of a landscape to effect serious change, to warp, to expand from the center of the mind, to accrete. My choice of that particular high desert site for a home was most painstakingly made.

Inviting that much space into my life at such a malleable age has turned out to have a reverberative and long half-life, shelf-life, pantry-life. I was watching old movies last night, and some of the Civil War footage, and thought "I want lace curtains one day." You know, the kind that you see as you drive by old farmhouses, the kind you see at the onset of dark on the prairie, the ones wavering just so as you drive by and think about the concept of home. I miss this feeling. I still feel homeless in New York most of the time, and fight it.

I am trying to make myself strong, trying to not feel the alien terror of anonymous places like airports with dirty carpets, subway tunnels with sulphur smell rising from the grates, giant warehouse stores brimming with flourescent lights, constant change of place to place. I am excited for a time when I can have a house again. When I visited my sister last month, my favorite part of her house was the old 1930's wooden back porch, old screens still latched strangely, set up for summer cross-breezes and set above the backyard with a view of the neighbor's houses curving upward.

I thought that this was a place that felt like home. This is where I would have spent my entire adolescence, with a stack of Virginia Woolf books strewn across the dirty floor, notebooks of scribbled ideas, packets of seeds, bizarre almanacs and books on how to make your own herbal elixirs, homemade jam. What we agreed on, was that it felt like "home", to both of us. It had those qualities that we remembered growing up, tactile wooden smell, creaking screen doors, privacy, space to dream, access to inside/outside, free but still safe.

As a teenager I used to sneak out onto the roof outside my bedroom window and smoke cigarettes. My father would get furious b/c the roof itself was not in the best shape and me sending the entire front porch to the ground would have been kind of a bummer. But I couldn't help myself, and mostly just sat there while the cigarette dwindled away unsmoked. I was looking at the huge elm and maple trees outside, moving silently overhead. I was thinking about something C.S. Lewis had written, on learning of his wife's terminal disease, that there was nothing more beautiful than the image of bare branches against a night sky.

I am still trying to find my right place in the world, but just recently it has dawned on me, I am ready for a Home.

april 8, 2011 elg

Kermit Lynch

And trying to cobble together a few starting place fragments, for an organization to follow. There are innumerable books/articles/posts on soil composition-- for it to work here and now, I must combine the personal with the scientific. I have to find a way in, a scratching place, a tiny toe-hold in this vast rock face. EG

best Vouvray vineyard sites, (acc. to Loyau)

La Bourdonnerie. A wild site where bumblebees (les bourdons) seek shelter.
Bel air. A well-situated site that has a pretty appearance.
Barguins. A vineyard created after much hesitation by the proprietors. They shilly-shallied (barguigner) for a long time before deciding to plant.
Bois Rideau (frost curtain). A forest rises above the vineyard sheltering it from frost and hail.
Gaimont. A knoll that receives lots of sunshine.
Paradis. Vines that prduce the fruit of the Creator.
Les Gais d'Amant. A site preferred by lovers.
Les Maderes. A vineyard near the village of Vernou whose wine in certain years has a flavor reminiscent of Madeira.
La Reveillerie. A vineyard with an eastern exposure that receives the earliest rays of sun (reveil=awakening).
La Queue de Merluche. A parcel of vines that is shaped like a salted cod's tail, which we call merluche (queue=tail).

Kermit Lynch, Adventures on the Wine Route, 43

a place to start:

In Pays Nantais, there are 3 main soil types: sandy soils, soils from acid rock rich in potassic minerals, and soils from basic rock rich is ferromagnesian minerals. The sedimentary rock is made up of armoricain sandstone and schist, magmatic granite or gabbros rocks, and metamorphic gneiss, micaschist, amphibolite or serpentinite rocks.

In Anjou, the sub-soil is mainly composed of argillaceous slate, sandy shale and carboniferous schist from the Armorican Massif. Eruptive seams of spilite, rhyolite and phtanite are also found here.

In Touraine, the sub-soil is composed of chalk limestone from the Paris Basin with clay-limestone and flinty clay soils; the terraces of the banks of the Loire and the Vienne are made of sand and gravel. The banks of the Cher are often made of flinty clay soils.

(from vinvaldeloire.com)

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?

march 12, 2009 elg

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.

\\marfa, tx\\
march 6, 2009

Bog Queen, by Seamus Heaney

I lay waiting
Between turf-face and demesne wall,
Between Heathery levels
And glass-toothed stone.

My body was Braille
For the creeping influences:
Dawn suns groped over my head
And cooled at my feet,

Through my fabrics and skins
The seeps of winter
Digested me,
The illiterate roots

Pondered and died
In the cavings
Of stomack and socket.
I lay waiting

On the gravel bottom,
My brain darkening,
A jar of spawn
Fermenting underground

Dreams of Baltic amber.
Bruised berries under my nails,
The vital hoard reducing
In the crock of the pelvis.

My diadem grew carious,
Gemstones dropped
In the peat floe
Like the bearings of history.

My sash was a black glacier
Wrinkling, dyed weaves
And phoenician stichwork
Retted on my brests'

Soft moraines.
I knew winter cold
Like the nuzzle of fjords
At my thighs -

The soaked fledge, the heavy
Swaddle of hides.
my skull hibernated
in the wet nest of my hair.

Which they robbed.
I was barbered
And stripped
By a turfcutter's spade

Who veiled me again
And packed coomb softly
Between the stone jambs
At my head and my feet.

Till a peer's wife bribed him.
The plait of my hair,
A slimy birth-cord
Of bog had been cut

And I rose from the dark,
Hacked bone, skull-ware,
Frayed stitches, tufts,
Small gleams on the bank.

Rock Salt

Rock salt,

polished-bronze.

Your colors are black and silver, gold and mica-schist.

You are very old,

and description of you must be succinct.

You have become too sharp

in my heart (black-lit).

When I breathe in

you entangle my thoughts.

When I exhale, you lodge yourself

like sharp pebbles in the soft parts of my heart.

I am sad like a storm

brooding over trees,

fuming soft like clouds,

(releasing rain over fields).

You have covered your mouth onto mine,

like a death-lid,

faint taste of blood-metal in the rain.

I asked to be struck,

Thorough-core,

Lit-match

(now I am filled with sparks).

I remember only shininess and dark—

through opals, grey glittering gems,

Glance-lit.

You are shapeshifter:

Dark smoke,

Written-on,

Polished stone.

I am embers ground,

(Shavings curled in the fire),

Black sand then glass--

rock-peeled--

stone-schist--

(black alchemist).                         (4-2010) elg

Lampblack

You are ravens-head,
lampblack.
I am powdered ash, white stone,
goldenrod.

Together we make a circuit,
halo-haze, coiled spring, resin-ground.

You are obsidian,
lava-ground, jet-stone.
I am cindered-flowers, dry marigold,
sandalwood, sweet smoke.

You are inscriber, chalk-marker,
Graphite-sewn.
I am worked-on, cinder-prone,
Soapstone.

(older poem, elg 2010)

Source/seed/soil.

"The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually."

Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 3