new, NOW.

I have been reading back through these past couple years of writings,,,, and find it extremely poignant and reassuring to find common threads, recurring obsessive subjects, lists of rocks, minerals, soils....alchemical formulas, shards, pieces strewn, bits collected off of the path.

I have found all areas of interest concentrated (the last couple of years, but sudden NOW) in WINE, of all places. I have found an equal response of pressure and resistance between this subject and my WILL. I want to isolate the parts of this subject that resound,,, the parts that are commensurate with my poetic nature-- not even nature exactly, with my specific, and poetic recognition of minutiae in a glittering world.

I am willing to step off of cliffs, and drop into this new dark. I am excited about the landscape that is constructing in bits around me,,, I am excited about mica schist, about the kimmeridgian crescent of shells and fossil chalk soil, about licorella and light off of mica in black dirt.

These are beautiful things, and what I am building on right now. I am not a weak or silly person. I am not stuck with my head in the clouds. My feet are on the ground, firm, and I am focused with a shale-edge of intent, (JUMP)ing into the new landscape of my LIFE.

notes I took while working.... (wine bible)

champagne soils, white chalk soils; "chalk crescent, the area that spans from the British cliffs to Champagne was the basin of a vast prehistoric sea some 65 million years ago. When the water receded, it left behind minerals like quartz and zircon, fossils and sea urchins, sea sponges and other sea animals,"---producing vast quantities of(CHALK).

alchemical terms

bittern: solution of magnesium salts
black ash: impure sodium carbonate
black lead: graphite, an allotrope of carbon
brimstone: sulfur (S)
chalk: calcium carbonate (CaCO3, carbonate of lime, mild calcareous earth). Acid of chalk is carbon dioxide (CO2, carbonic acid, fixed air)
charcoal: either a charred carbonaceous material or its primary constituent, namely carbon. Lavoisier coined the term carbone (carbon) to distinguish the element from impure charred material; however, the distinction was not universally adopted right away.
cobalt. Named by the copper miners of the Hartz Mountains after the evil spirits the 'kobolds' which gave a false copper ore; despised because of its uselessness and unhealthiness (it was often found mixed with arsenic), and because it resembled silver but wasn't.
copper-nickel, named for another devil, because it looked like copper but wasn't-- our nickel.
cuprite. Red cuprous oxide ore.
fulminating gold. Made by adding ammonia to the auric hydroxide formed by precipitation by potash from metallic gold dissolved in aqua regis. Highly explosive when dry.
King's Yellow. A mixture of orpiment with white arsenic.

you are graphite dust

You are graphite dust,
blown.

You are gold without knowing it,
Smoke from a slow fire,
wet.

You are leaves in a pile at dusk,
You are webbed like a spider’s nest underground, you are seen,
sheen,
opalescent.

You can smolder
like coal fires underground,
But leave only soft chalk on my arms as you hold them under you.

You are earthly,
and sharp,
and bright,
like hot cut black stones.

(I tried to show you myself in places,
tried to exchange a running picture-show for words,
tried to surround you with a moving screen of myself,
projected).

I should quiet down,
still myself
watch as bruises on white skin appearing,
charcoal on scrim,
silhouette on sugar backdrop.

You are a cameo, love,
black shape cut poised on pearl,
black smoke curling around me in the night.