dusk walk

recently collected objects: half-pressed (one side flat, one rounded) tangle of tumbleweed, two red-striated scraps of rock (marbled), a bare branch sprung into white bloom (small, hollow-husked) dropped into tabletop hole, a whorled piece of thick green glass (lens) packed with dirt on the back side, and a last rising succession of mourning doves out of power line grid, (traced in order, loudly, coldly, above our stone-kicking feet).

new

I found an old remnant of writing this morning (reworked a bit, below), and can barely remember writing it. It's uncanny how things, once articulated, have a way of making themselves true. The wish of a dry and dusty desert landscape life has always threaded itself through my day-to-day life, (under-conscious hazy cloud backdrop), but never have the details (once specified, thrown into the wind) so obviously become the track that my life runs along.


'I am ready for that open space I have always looked for. I am ready to face a landscape that is bare, windblown, sparse, and scrubbed. I am ready to face the wind on sharp intake as I come around the side of the trailer-- I am ready for the scratches and dark hollows under my own eyes. I am ready to turn into something new, into something old, something that I was in my own mind before anyone else saw it coming. I am ready for red dust on my skirt, and jeans and off-white velvet sweatshirts stretched thin. I am ready for the lonesome whistle of wind, for distant train calls, for sharp corners that recede into infinity, for blue sky and yellow earth. I can examine these things now, and think to myself that they are strange, I am strange, I have been building an arsenal of vocabulary and voice, of tumbled, shorn bits of words that make sense now in their new combinations. I have been collecting bits of stone and rock, in each pocket they click together, hanging down at the lowest part, against my leg from the inside. I have been collecting these bits, pieces, flakes, scraps, and now I can string them together into a new alphabet.'

I once admired a (textile) artist in Seattle who went on walks around the area collecting small objects. When she got home she arranged these objects into a new personal lexicon for herself-- each thing a letter-- their groupings turned haphazard into poetry. (In art school I made a board game like this once-- a player would arrange objects onto a haiku pattern grid, spin a spinner that linked object with word-- I think I called it the "random poetry generator"??? Not many people could appreciate the subtleties of haiku (you were supposed to write it down and take it with you!) that centered on recurring words like 'taxidermy', 'neon bar sign','smoke','darkness', and 'dirty ashtray'.....)

I am tired of ideas around the edges... am tired of skimming the surface of things, of exploring the safe remnants around the edge. If I were to go to the heart of the matter would it seem scary? Is the process different, would it seem too big-- would I be able to recognize my ideas from the center, instead of noticing their outside contours first?

These are questions I hope to answer from the desert....

Last night I dreamed of mountains, greenhouses, castles, and snow. I read somewhere that when you dream of exploring buildings, houses you are really examining the twisting passageways of your own brain. It is a strange place indeed, I had been to some of these places in dreams before but I had never been able to access certain parts of the landscape-- now suddenly I was "behind the walls"... a pathway in/through. I have been reading John Updike like mad lately-- an image of a green house from yesterday lodged in my brain-- at the time I thought "there's my novel".... how strange. Of course the ideas would be housed (dark green painted walls and wood trim), cold and creaky wooden house, cold but full of books... steps up to another story... I'd like to hold on to this shell of story. I know I will recognize it when I see it again.

house

Snowing softly outside my bedroom window, my room a tangled mass of color and sparkled glints of fabric, books. I am enjoying it today... the muddle and mess... the soft breathing of the things I have collected. I am enjoying them now, as they will be replaced soon enough, by clarity, sparcity, by open plain.

As I was reading the poem below, I found something in it-- something I cannot quite articulate, but that corresponds to me, to my life. Actually it is a shadowy recurring dream that I have sometimes, a dream of a house, the front sort of half-room entrance way (portal) of a dark Park Hill Denver house... It is soft afternoon, and that is all. It is afternoon, and the particles of air have congealed into a dusty thick cloud inside the house. It is afternnon, but it means something, it is quiet as steps on thick plush carpet, but there is a sort of waiting, a hush, that time of day that turns to something else. It is shadowy, dim and mauve grey, warm grey, house thick with upholstered quiet things, layers of rugs on top of carpets, window out to a shady green evergreen shade, cold fragrant shade. I think it is the time of afternoon when the children walk home from school. I have always recognized this place, a feeling of peace in a house, (dim mix with green nostalgia), to be inside looking out through softness, into a gathering dusk-light thick particles of air like stirred pea soup.

The House on Bishop Street (rita dove)

No front yard to speak of,
just a porch cantilevered on faith
where she arranged the canary's cage.
The house stayed dark all year
though there was instant light and water.

(No more gas jets hissing,

their flicker glinting off
Anna Rettich's midwife spectacles
as she whispered 'think a baby'
and the babies came.) Spring
brought a whiff of cherries, the kind
you boiled for hours in sugar and cloves

from the yard of the Jewish family next door.
Yumanski refused to speak so
she never bought his vegetables
at the Canal Street Market. Gertrude,
his youngest and blondest,
slipped by mornings for bacon and grits.
There were summer floods and mildew

humming through fringe, there was
a picture of a ship she passed
on her way to the porch, strangers calling
from the street 'Ma'am, your bird
shore can sing!' If she leaned out she could glimpse
the faintest of mauve-- no more than an idea--
growing just behind the last houses.

(from 'Thomas and Beulah')

milk light

I remember
certain kinds of light
that belong only
to old days

basement book days
underground stone days

humming disks of light
roaming hallways
pooling in church corridors
seeping under office doors

like
spilt
yellow milk.

roebling tea room

'el gaucho' mate tea
reminds me of Christmasses
I did not have.

cardamom on my tongue
green bitter seed
spice hangs in the air
like evergreen smoke.

writing out of sadness
turns inward like a screw,
wooden heart
choking,
coughs dust.

the solid-dirty-grain of the table is the only reality.

AMNH wall tag

Birds of the Pampas
Lake Chascomus, near Buenos Aires, Argentina

Chilean flamingo, black-necked swan and the southern screamer, called by Hudson "that clarion-voiced watch-bird of the night."