from "Candor" by Anne Carson

Could 1
If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name.

(for Roni Horn)

Jerez, SPAIN

Casa Balbino, Sanlucar

True Manzanilla

Sanlucar de Barremeda
Manzanilla:
Pedro Romero 'Aurora'
Delgado Zuleta 'La Goya'
Y
Langostinos, Coquines, Chocos...........!

"Each one of us, then, should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor's map of his lost fields and meadows.  Thoreau said that he had the map of his fields engraved in his soul.  And Jean Wahl once wrote:

Le moutonnement des haies
C'est en moi que je l'ai.

(Poeme, p. 46)

(The frothing of the hedges
I keep deep inside me.)

Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived."  (!!!)

G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 11-12

This rainy day.

This rainy day, thick with birdcalls that reverberate like bells in fog, like chimes that bounce off of burnished metal and glass, like old Paris, when I sent prayers up from dark church floors.  I walk in the park and the air under the branches feels heavy like smoke (incense), it is thick and hangs close to the ground. 

I walked around and around the park today, around the back of it, past the garages and empty cement pools.  I walked by the mechanic shops and the warehouses.  I remembered Seattle walking through shipyards, past docks and under tunnels.  This wet air damps down the noise of cars, makes it easier to think, easier to feel gracious, grateful.

Now I sit, inside, listening, perched between day and night like a dim bird.

Foillard 'Cote du Py' 2010 Morgon in my glass, and Elizabeth Bishop translations of Octavio Paz on the page.  I hold onto poetry today, its spacings, its spaces, its structure.  New Mexico storms would always roll through so fast, in dark afternoons I used to sit and read under my window, in my adobe house wrapped tight like a blanket around my shoulders, eyes out to the night.

morning reading

"Her untidy blueprint reminded me of yet another kind of house: a memory palace.  This ancient mnemonic device was used by orators in Greece and Rome, and is still a trade secret of modern memory-contest champions.  A practitioner visualizes a large edifice with a warren of rooms that she furnishes with familiar objects.  She then attaches the items or thoughts that she wishes to recall to the objects.  As she walks mentally through the edifice, they act as prompts."

(Judith Thurman, "Drawn from Life: A Profile of Alison Bechdel", The New Yorker, April 23, 2012, 54)

"A few, the choicest, dreams compile a miscellany of places unbeholden to reality, with its more tedious details.  A dream occurred one night, then returned again, in such a way that, making my way at night towards a real place, I recognized the staircase of a house in the rue des Courcelles, and its wallpaper in raw jute.  But my nights reveal it printed with lions of periwinkle blue, beset with oak balusters, with treads and hand-rails of oak; a forest of oaks sacrificed to an 1890 staircase.... The periwinkle lions are pure creatures of dream, held fast in their oneiric alignment by the most authentic plinths and stylobates in their world.  Periwinkle blue, rimmed with a grey-blue border, the mouth heraldically gaping, the tongue a marine helix.  More or less upright, they have a heavy open forepaw.  Rather English lions, in fact.  How lucky that I can't draw.  I'd stick them in my margins for you, faithful copies of non-existent figures.  I take them for granted now, they serve as a firm link, an indispensable complement, to that pattern which is reality."

(from Evening Star, the last recollections of Colette, 50)