Winter reading

“Along the pavement I will grind

A dust half sun, half glass. My deeds

In winter time the ceiling hears;

My verse the cold damp corner reads.

To window frames my garret room

Will bow, rehearsing verse, and prove

How folly, trouble, and adventure 

Can, bursting, leapfrog to the roof.

The storms will rage for endless days

And waste my means and ends estranged;

I’ll suddenly remember suns

And find the world is long since changed.”

(from ‘About My Verses’, Poems by Boris Pasternak, tr, Eugene M. Kayden)

(((Colors of winter)))

(Fog, creeping in Montagne de Reims forest)

Acts of Devotion

I have always been obsessed with 'devotional poetry', poetry to a sort of a God (not a Judeo-Christian one), but to something more essential, more intrinsic, more.... Sometimes prayers to the day, to each morning (Annie Dillard), but sometimes with more fire (Sufiism-- heartbreaking pyre, burning of the self for the 'other'..). Over the years I keep switching from morning prayers to a Himalayan blue sky to evening rivers of fire & wine (Rumi). In my ongoing collection of such poems (like strung prayerbeads), I have become entranced with rituals I cannot necessarily name.

from The Magellanic Clouds by Diane Wakoski

IV

On the very top
of a  mountain
I have struck a gong,
1800 names are written on it
and drop to the world like a handful of sequins.
1000 of those names are yours,
who take many shapes,
have many lines,
voices, breaths,
names.
The mountain is a rock.
The mountain is snow.
The mountain is my
home.
I do not know how to offer you
anything greater:
praise not on your ground
but on mine.

(from 'The Acts of Devotion')

Mornings.

Devotional poems,,, what does this mean? It keeps running through my head, devotional, marks of prayer, marks of offering. I think of such small sweet actions that can hardly be named-- a slight tilt of the head and pause, a raising of the hot cup of tea just up, just so, steam in the early morning light, smoke smudged across a shaft of morning light.

Here it is trains, and small birds that fit themselves into the squares in the fence, chirping. It is pumpkin pieces in the grass and squirrels, it is the dull rattle of hundreds of seed pods overhead. The umbrella tree overhead is haunted with friendly ghosts. The birds pay their respects daily, swooping in in giant curlicues and back out, in a whoosh. It is blue sky and no shadow.

Mornings are the best, the air feels fresh, scrubbed, 'newly minted'. There is enough space to insulate-- enough quiet space buffer to wrap around the windows I look out of-- second skin, second eyes. The birdsong creates this field, this buffer, and the breeze. The light that falls down from the top of windows is blue, and clear, and tinged with winter cold. It is stretched, and only blue at the edges.

I am trying to capture something, what?? When we make small bows to the morning, to the early parts of day, what are we doing? When we listen and separate each part from the other, pull studs out of the fabric, are we marking time? I think we are stopping time, for a moment. After so much heartache yesterday-- how to reconnect with my own power? How to regain, recapture a heart connection with the world? For me it starts with small steps today, small acts of devotion, small stops, small beats: blue like polished bronze in the light, blue with metallics just under the surface, blue washed over the soaped fabric of morning, trains, trains, round notes of birds like tiny metal gongs, shadows becoming sharper on the wall,, vines, grapes shrunken to the vine, breeze.  There is a distant hum of traffic, but here, here, here.... is touching my head to the ground.

tasting notes. (repost from 3/2/15)

My wine descriptions can tend towards the flowery... sometimes they become long poems that have little to do with wine.  I try and restrain myself. Usually I am able to bring my thoughts up just shy of overblown, just this side of ecstatic poetry. But I am realizing that the standard I should hold myself to is my own-- what does "speak" to me about a certain wine?  What shows itself to me, what is revealed, and how to translate a complicated experience?

Writing about wine cannot be strictly intellectual-- it is a translation through ebbs and flows of an experience. It is layered and sewn, pasted and glued end to end. And back to front, sub-soil through sod through wind to tops of clouds. I have been letting my imagination run away with me lately, and have been hugely surprised that my tasting notes circle around to the beginning, all on their own. When it works, they curve around to the beginning after running a gamut of thoughts, smells, memories, and colors. They become a stack of trace paper with drawings on each page, they become a cross-section landscape of a summer rainstorm turned to dusk in the desert. My tasting notes have the potential to frame all of the ways I have dabbled in the world, all the ways I have of  remembering things, all the quiets and noise, all the lights and the darks.

I've been trying to celebrate my own language of wine. My 'language' incorporates many different fields of study-- everyone's does! If there is Greek poetry in my notes its because I lived it in the mountains of Santa Fe-- wet sage and chamisa breeze through my book pages. If the trajectory of a wine speaks to me in curves and tapestry weights its because of countless hours spent walking through the dark and muffled quiet of Met museum storehouses, through dim lit picture galleries. Tasting notes have become a story-- an arc of sensations that curves back through older stories. I have smelled the powdery, sharp tang of high desert chamisa in a bottle of Foradori Nosiola. I have tasted hot chamomile-in-the-sun in dark sherry soleras of Sanlucar.  I am starting to celebrate the verbose and the sensual in my tasting notes, the trajectories and tangents because that is how I experience wine. It is pre-verbal, it is nostalgic, it is haptic and tactile. It is happening before any of these words.

I remember a man performing a Samuel Beckett play on a dark stage in Taos, NM. When we went outside after, you could smell smoke in the air, through sagebrush. You sensed that wood stoves were leaving thick, smudged tracery above each house, and the sky was pitch black. I think this is why I have always loved living in desert landscapes-- there is less sensory noise, the spaces are more open and clear-- they are scrubbed with soap suds and sun in the morning, and stain brightly from a few select markers.

My friend that lives in the desert of West Texas told me that one mountain range bordering his property grew out of an old sea bed, a huge limestone shelf that has eroded down through fossils, sea creatures and chalk. The mountains on the other side are volcanic, and ring with a sharp metallic sound. I watched a storm roll towards me in that desert, and tried to understand the gold dust that kept falling on my white skin. His skin is bronze from the sun, he sat under a burning stick of incense laughing, saying that being dusted by anything was sacred.

In my writing I try to pull at a thread-- without unravelling the whole cord of spun experience and sensation. If I am lucky I can trace it through wines-- I find the personality of the winemaker in the wines and it is astonishing! In Sanlucar I came to understand two different winemakers by tasting through barrels of their sherries.  One shone through her wines deep and quiet and shining in the dark-- a cold brook in the early spring. Another was loud and alive with yellow bursts of energy-- it was electricity and sea tang, burning in the sun, burned onto the crisp, hot sand-edge of coast.

Tasting the 2011 Domaine de Montbourgeau 'L'Etoile', (50% Chardonnay/ 50%Savagnin sous-voile, Jura, FR) today. Its a mixed experience, and somewhat confusing. This was one of my favorite wines when I first started working at UVA Wines in Williamsburg, BK years ago. It was a bit of a tough sell because of its salinity and vibrant sherry-like qualities. I remember it as tangy and laser-edged, clean but also incorporating the oxidized aromas and tastes of Savagnin under flor (chicken stock, turmeric, curry, tea leaves, sea-salt). When I started at UVA I had years of selling sherry under my belt. This was a wine I sold with zeal-- equal parts all things I loved about wine: clean, focused aromatics of an alpine chardonnay, and oxidized yellow viscosity and depth.

Today I feel nostalgic. Is this why the wine is taking me back to late Fall afternoons? Kicking through piles of old leaves, "after-school", walking home in somewhat meandering and lonely ways? The wine opened up with manzanilla sherry and apple blossom on the nose, pale gold and clear. What is confusing to my brain and palate is that half of this wine is sherry and half cold, crisp yellow apple aromatics. I can't seem to fuse the two. I want more of one or the other, not both. The wine opened up more to granny smith apple and blossom, & the purity of cold-pressed apple juice. There was a little yellow candle-wax in the viscosity, and slight yellow spice (curry, turmeric).

On the palate the wine became yellow sour apples, sherry tang sharp, savory & apple-turmeric spice. Do you see why this is confusing? It combines fresh and cooked elements in equal proportions. The body of the wine is a bit thin, but still very fresh. As I drank the wine it took on more savory baked apple components, and a curry powder (vs leaves). There was a hint of cinnamon but no sugar, baked yellow apples. And then the stack of descriptors congealed into a blustery late Fall afternoon: falling leaves, decay, cold wind, slightly sodden yellow fruit on the ground & dimmed aromatics.

The wine took on the shape of a cold, gray day that was spent indoors, looking out at the falling leaves and tree branches. There was a dusting of black tea leaves/oolong/tannin pucker and shorter finish. The baked apple atmosphere added a malty, vinegary depth and a tinge of dirty rainwater. Does this sound appealing? It is-- but not exactly the experience I was looking for. The brightness of apple blossoms folded into wet yellow flowers with a haunting of smoke and wet wood. Drinking this wine took me back to cold, clear, and lonely afternoons. It was the loneliness of childhood, of sharp experience, of watching lights come on in the houses across the street.

Winter-- to some--is a blue sky of steaming wine and nuts,
A fragrant punch, to some, of cinnamon,
Some get their salty orders from the brutal stars
To carry back to smoke-filled huts.
(127, Osip Mandelstam, 1922)

And again wild fruit falls from the apple trees.

Happiness rolls by like a golden hoop
Fulfilling someone else's will,
And cutting the air with the palm of your hand
You chase the sweetness of Spring.
(from 123, Osip Mandelstam, 1920)

Elohim Creating Adam, William Blake, 1795

The face of the waters

    

I woke to fog, & myself this morning. My mind is the bird that flits from rock to rock and does not rest. It is the fly that lights, alights but cannot find purchase. I feel the flame of my mind like a candle being blown roughly, the smoke of it is ragged and blown, the center eludes. I try and focus my mind through the prism of this poem, find some relief in the description of a space—(a shock of air hanging between two masses?), a cool, clear defined block of airs that moves fitfully but is contained within a clear geographic skin…

‘The same mist hangs in thin layers

among the valleys and gorges of the mainland

like rotting snow-ice sucked away

almost to spirit; the ghosts of glaciers drift

among those folds and folds of fir: spruce and hackmatack—

dull, dead, deep peacock-colors,

each riser distinguished from the next

by an irregular nervous saw-tooth edge,

alike, but certain as a stereoscopic view.’

(from “Cape Breton”, by Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927-1979)

When I read this, reread this,,, it changes, it moves. I find relief in this somehow—while other parts of her poem are rockbound/landbound, anchored,, this is a breath—a movement of air over waters. I always seem to think back to William Blake on mornings like this. I remember seeing a set of his drawings at the old Tate Gallery in London, drawings of the most urgent kind, drawings on Biblical themes. His drawing of God’s Creation of the world has always stuck in my mind.. an illustration of that first spark of life. His treatment of this moment seem to tease at the difficulty of it-- like my mind today—he lights like a pinprick on it and flits up again in seaspray, unable to easily describe it. I am unmoved by so much Biblical history/description, but felt completely awash in the lushness and crystalline depths of these moments illustrated and written about by Blake.

And the troubled rumblings of Creation: ‘The Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters…(Genesis 1:2, translation chosen by M Greenberg in “Speak Silence: Rhetoric and Culture in Blake’s Poetical Sketches”)”God moves over the waters, God’s face was on the waters’.. the very first spark of creation was a face over dark waters, the first action a ‘breath’. The thing I cannot wrap my mind around, the thing that pulls at my gut, is the deepness of those waters, the sheer obsidian darkness of waters that were endlessly packed, receding, & unnamed. They were ‘mass’ of uncreated lands, but the stuff was all there! 

With desperate wrangling, I remember trying to translate a Greek version of the Old Testament myself into English, & remember the sheer insanity of this. Greek is big—encompassing, whole & entire—trying to piecemeal it into the minute sections and chopped fragments of modern English seemed impossible--- but ..”God.. moved// on the face of the waters..” seemed as close as one could get… to the moments, the string of moments that were marking, starting to mark time/place/action/thing. The whirling before was unquantifiable mass, and then a blush became apparent on the skin of the dark water, a lighter shade that could speak of itself in single, against the massive ‘other’.

This smudge of ‘first’ was made by an action—an action of looking, an action of closeness—a breathing, like someone breathing hot breath over ice on a winter windowpane. Something appeared there on the skin of the water—just there, that was new—the matter ‘became’ in response to the action, the ‘something’ grew out of the water like a bloom, rising up to meet such a close and fevered caress.

Am old Polaroid falls out of my book, my mother and I in matching coral colored dresses—me at 2 ½ years old, eyes closed, her smiling. She and I do not speak right now—mostly this seems appropriate and like a huge sigh of relief. But I feel the dark undertow of it, in the bottom part of my heart—maybe a marking of something generically unnatural or sad—sad in the whole but not the specific—sad in the overarching sky but not in my lone self, pinpricked into the dark hill of today.

I spent time with my friend last night, the traveler, and heard gems and rock strata in the things he said. His movements right now are marked by passage through sedimentary rock, they are marked by layers in the earth, by the ringing of volcanic rock, by mountain colors. I am homebound, landlocked, stuck. But I try to throw my mind out like a boomerang today, into the night air, into the early morning air, into the spray of seaside air to see what it might bring back. And Elizabeth Bishop ends her poem “the birds keep on singing, a calf bawls, the bus starts./ The thin mist follows/The white mutations of its dream;/an ancient chill is rippling the dark brooks” (from ‘Cape Breton’).

sky

Most of my life I have just been looking for a quiet place to sit. It seems silly to write this. It seems so easy. But I don't think I had realized it until now. I have always had the calling... to be quiet, to be observant, to trace shadows on the wall. These are the things I was as a child. I think they grew into a sort of shyness. Being a writer is to be a watcher, an observer. If not watching from the sidelines, then I am called into awareness of my own movements in space, exactly at the moment(s) that I am making them.

It is difficult to pour the tea from the teapot and simultaneously trace the steam-trails that rise cloudy over my table. Difficult to drink the tea while naming concussive//successive hits of: //dry earth//desert sand//wet leaves//(each), as they break like waves into my awareness. It is inward to sit with hands cupped, (in-shape), and outward to gaze skyward, to translate the near shade of translucent blue arcing overhead. It is painful to switch so quickly from being prone to the world, (acted-upon), to become describer of these things felt. But this transition from soft body to clicking consciousness is one I am practicing-- burn-path tracery, knife-edge projection.

Mountain skies have a different color of blue-- a crystalline, watercolor wash of metallic and smoke that is not seen at lower altitudes. I am thinking of the blue sky in Boulder, CO as I write this. I am looking out of my window in Denver, CO and thinking that these two colors are close-- they are neighbors, they are adjacent. But the essential quality of the air is different, it is painted over our heads with a different brush. The weave is looser in Boulder air, the blue tightens around a smaller woven scaffold here.

I can be soft and peaceful looking out of the window here. I am relieved to return to myself in a quiet moment, to feel the stretch of my body through my clothes, to watch creeping sunspots alternate with shade. All the best things come from here. From the quiet space of 'here' afternoon. There is a ticking of clocks, a softness of rugs, a weight that means 'afternoon'. The washing machine hums and ticks, my tea expands into the pores of the hand-thrown earthenware cup. My fingers flutter in arcs and curlicues over the keyboard. The birds are hovering over a nest.

It doesn't matter exactly where I am sitting-- which town, which city, which home. What matters is the cloak of peace and introspection than I can make, a soft force-field expelled from my sitting form. (from the center of my sitting form, back against the couch, soft rug under my bare feet). It is hard to sit in this open space. I have become a receiver-- a ringing conduit: for energy, for memories, for spirit, for sound. I have become a malleable body that is porous. Sometimes it feels too open-- an old yoga teacher would tell us to be open like the sky. Sometimes in those states I would start to cry, feeling my body becoming translucent-- open to shifting winds, sun beams, open-woven like the sacred blue watercolor wash of wherever-sky smudged and shining overhead.

"Anavopaya is the means whereby the individual utilizes his own karanas or instruments as means for his transformation for Self-realization."
"In anavopaya, the senses, prana and manas are pressed into service."
(Pratyabhijnahrdayam, Jaideva Singh, 28)

(elg, march 9, 2015)

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