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