'Street Haunting'

"The hour should be evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves."

(Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth & Other Essays, 20)

splintered diamond mind

"The creative life ! Ascension. Passing beyond oneself. Rocketing out into the blue, grasping at flying ladders, mounting, soaring, lifting the world up by the scalp, rousing the angels from their ethereal lairs, drowning in stellar depths, clinging to the tails of comets. Nietzsche had written of it ecstatically-- and then swooned forward into the mirror to die in root and flower. << Stairs and contradictory stairs,>> he wrote, and then suddenly there was no longer any bottom; the mind, like a splintered diamond, was pulverized by the hammer-blows of truth."

Henry Miller, Sexus, 265

In the mind-world ideas are the indestructible elements which form the jewelled constellations of the interior life.

henry miller, sexus, 264

I will start with water and candlelight. For this is like me sitting next to you, without speaking. I am the candle flame above the steaming water. Though there is no wind I sway and flicker on the walls. I am reflected in you. We sit apart but together make pictures entwined. You invert my image, twist & turn in backwards, I light your watery expanse. We both seem to be still but are moving. Together we make steam chains, light particles underwater-- we make light then dark against the bottom of the bathtub. Together we are seamed at our edges, we are sewn by our opposite. We are quiet together but make columns on the cold window sill, lit from inside sill to outside storm. We make molecule clouds underwater-- watery shapes. Steam and smoke are the parts of ourselves that can entwine in real time.

(dec 19, 2012)

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.

house

Writing out of sadness is difficult-- the light scaffold today feels heavy. And yet, what do we have if no 'structure', no 'skin on the surface of the water', no 'steam fogging the windows from outside'. I want to write about the effect of one thing on another-- reciprocal or reverberative imprints, what smudges us with fingerprints, what brushes our faces with 'dark wings' (annie dillard), what leaves a dusting of residue on the tops of our arms, our upturned faces? How do we recognize and record our own trail through the world. What of we are residue, what of dust?

"A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability. We are constantly re-imagining its reality: to distinguish all these images would be to describe the soul of the house; it would mean developing a veritable psychology of the house." (bachelard, the poetics of space, 17)

Brooklyn

I had forgotten about an older life. My older sun-filled contemplative life (of just a few years ago), sitting on the floor, looking out of Brooklyn windows. From breezy tree-tops, long shadows and frilled sun patterns crept slowly up and over windowsills. Most of my weathered, chip-painted sills were perfect perches for gold-flecked, sun-prism wine glasses. I watched my city through panes of cracked glass.

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