Walking on a Shell Road in North Carolina

From Theoi.com: "The Birth of Aphrodite"

I never liked Watteau's "The Pilgrimage to Cythera."
It seemed a confection, nothing like the goddess
born from sea-spume tinged with blood and sperm,
borne on a scallop shell, sharp edge slicing the waves.

Watteau's dry brush evaporates in this god-haunted
place. Aphrodite is here, there's no place she is not,
but here we must meet her at the end of a shell road,
shards of oyster shell and scallop cutting our bare feet.

"Isn't she the goddess of beauty and pleasure? Then why
is the walk to meet her so painful?" It's the breakage that
paves the way, a sparrow says; it's love's pilgrim path, coos
a dove. I suck a drop of blood from my thumb where a wild
rose pricked it. Aphrodite might be laughing as I pick my way
down the road, but she'll know I'm her own when I arrive.

While I Stopped for Coffee

“The word virga is derived from Latin meaning ‘twig’ or ‘branch’.”

Driving here means being pressed into a thin layer of
horizon, thinner than the scant soil overlaying caliche,
by the pale blue hand of the sky. That hand fingers a
diffusion of light, opens: its gift to me dark, feathered,
subliming before it can touch the parched fields.
There’s nothing twig-like about this; what streams
from those clouds looks soft as a small child’s hair.
If La Llorona still weeps for her drowned children, it’s
virga she weeps, her tears never touching the ground.

Overexposure

The details wash out, I try to fix them in my mind and can’t
quite: the vast loneliness, the lilac-gray altostratus filtering
over coruscating gold oxbows and ponds, the fugitive colors
of a rosary of small lakes 33,000 feet below. The seating is
intimate here, thigh touching thigh despite some small shifts
in position, the improving book and pursuit of a perfected
self a tangible yearning in the man next to me, or in me, it’s
hard to tell we’re seated so close. His fingers are fine-boned,
clean, almost delicate, his narrow face a hands-breadth away.

The angels' point of view: a silk mesh that sieves the world down
to the accidental touch, my internal weather, an overexposure that
bleaches me. Who am I gathering these baubles for, if not you?

Memento mori

The moon’s still fat, that radiant
pearl, but a bit lopsided as it wanes.

A pair of moth wings, tattered and
dusting the front porch, but no body.

No Perseids to be seen, and then I
remember: we’re the shooting stars.

At Pease Park

Sensate: the word a scrim between the world and me. Words can’t carry
all my selves extended through the maze of a fingertip whorl, a glance.

Yes, I feel the grit between my sock and my heel, feel a tickle of sweat as
it trickles down my lower back, smell the resin of wood fresh-cut, of wet dog.

I see runners, each one a spectacular joy and catastrophe, gravity and time
playing with them, with me, their motion telling stories they wouldn’t admit to
a breathing world exhaling beauty everywhere, the roving eye of this beholder.

Laguna Gloria

Imagine, just for a moment, that you’re here with me. We sit on a bench
under cottonwood at the edge of a lagoon, where cicadas and dragonflies
break the heat of the day with bronze-laced wings. In my left hand, I hold
a burr oak acorn; in my right, a rain lily pod and two mountain laurel seeds.
It’s August, and my palms are warm and damp. The sun sets, the moon rises,
the Perseids wink in and out like fireflies. Imagine, just for a moment more:
light on dark water, as from my moist hands to yours pass the acorn, the rain lily,
the mountain laurel, their dreams of dry husks swelling, straining to sprout.

On Beholding a Digital Version of Giorgione's "The Tempest"

"…the beauty which agree,
In many a nameless being we retrace,
Whose course and home we knew not, nor shall know,
Like the lost Pleiad seen no more below."

- Byron, "Beppo"

In this representation of a painting, the characters are delineated,
but what they mean, who they are, the arc of the narrative—that
takes some looking. And by looking, I mean: hold still. Breathe. Look,
without forming words, look for alignments and breaks, hold descriptions
back even as they tug at you, ignore them as they pull at your sleeve.

Now, begin: There is a figure, female, beautiful, naked and adorned
and nursing a child. She looks frankly at you, a faint smile in her gaze.

There is a youth, looking off past the frame of the painting (or wherever
the image was cropped). There I am, or there you are, at another vertex.

And that vertex places you, me, us, right where the stream flows, at the
disjunction made by the rushing water and its low banks, outside the frame
and still in the picture, invited in by the gaze of the character and her smile.

It's different than words, this sort of storytelling—space can be time, and
the gap between the youth and the woman and me, or you, can be passing
time. The baby could be the youth. The viewer could be anyone, but now
the viewer is here at a keyboard, calling the moving water to mind, calling
the storm painted in the distance a source of the rush and cut of the stream.

The bones of the painting, the alignments, provide space for the connective
tissue of story, and the image becomes an object of contemplation. There:
I've broken the silence and all that's clear is words spill out of me, nothing yet
revealed about the painting except myself. That may be enough, though.

It's in the seemingly empty spaces between, where the story waits patiently
for you and me, the necessary characters at the vertex outside the frame.

Igneous Intrusion

You can see it after time has worn away the overlay of sediment. It's where
some combination of fault and pressure pushed the molten magma up, up—
the glittering that's seen comes from a slow cooling while buried: Pluton,
the underworld made crystalline. When the air cools at night, it groans, layer
fractured and sliding on deep layer, the same phaneritic texture that abrades
my fingertips until they bleed muttering cross-grained to itself.

It's like this, with these poems. Magma (not from the core, note the geologists,
but from induction and subduction, a friction closer to the surface) and me, both
waiting for the crystals to form, for the uplift and erosion and then, the sky.

Master Copy

One of the ways I learned to draw was
to slip my hand into Ingres' hand, copying a
portrait sketch first by mapping those points
that established the relationship between
one plane of the face drawn, to another.

It was a painstaking process, to attend so closely
to things under the surface—but once mapped,
the zygomatic arch waited for me, as if to see
whether my copy, feeling my way through the pressure
and motion Ingres made making that mark, was true.

Uncanny, how the anchor points and mapping dissolved
from structure under my hand, to my hand being overlaid
by that of the master as it moved. But I was younger then:
I needed to map and to anchor, I needed the practiced
structure Ingres gave rather than Tiepolo's brisk grace.

Now I'm far more free about the thing, the process,
and the early summer sky has enough Tiepolo to satisfy
my restless hand without it moving. Under the wash of light
and color, artless art I copy by way of seeing, overlaying
the Venetian in my mind's eye, time passes: the sun climbs
and bakes the sky white—an erasure by way of radiance of
Tiepolo, of Ingres, of those memories and bones I anchor by.

F G S

"The second time,
The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all
there is..."

From "My God, It's Full of Stars" by Tracy K. Smith (and here, half-way down the page)

Barred

"...I said to my heart,
Ravaged by darkness, 'Now, Soon, and Later have become
Each other—doors all closed, the windows blocked and barred for good—
All and sink down together to the bottom of the sea.
Do I wake or sleep? It is late tonight as it will ever be.'"

From "A Late History" by Weldon Kees

Entry

"Creak creak, the hinges need oil.
     Creak creak,
my heart swings open with praise for losers we are
      and those we’re not
by grace of a thousand fancy chances..."

From "In the Kingdom of Perpetual Repair" by Kevin Stein

Sweeps

"...at least
elsewhere those able for holiness—
its signs and rigors—are at work."

From "Linoleum" by Tess Gallagher

Meters

"...ironic in their outcast
dignity—as though, like some pine chests,

they might be prized in disuse..."

From "American Solitude" by Grace Schulman

Golf

"...Sidney
and Dizzy, Uncle Ben and Papa Yancey, are
over by Sylvester's Grot making the sweetest,
cheerfulest blues you ever heard. The air,
so called, is full of it. Poems are fluttering
everywhere like seed from a cottonwood tree."

From "The Afterlife: Letter to Sam Hamill" by Hayden Carruth

Embedded

"...we might coax you with pebbles
kept warm in the hand
or coins or the relics
of vanished animals..."

From "To Luck" by W. S. Merwin

Buona fortuna

"...the stables
where horseshoes hold

not just luck, but
beyond."

From "Book of Hours" by Kevin Young

Lactuca

"...within the ancient walls,
I walk from one epoch to another without a memory
to guide me."

From "In Jerusalem" by Mahmoud Darwish
Translated by Fady Joudah

Fantasia

"Well, come here towards the light.
Let me get a good look
at the ghosts in the grave of your palm."

From "Cruising 99" by Garrett Hongo

***

I never get tired of winter light.
Saw this on my way back from a Home Depot, house paint and brushes in the trunk of the car (hopefully it will be sunny tomorrow) and camera on the passenger seat.

Peek-a-boo

"Hello, hello, what to tell you was
The world's invisible..."

From "Historical Disquisitions" by Philip Whalen

Wrapper

"...there’s

hardly a vocabulary left to wonder, uncertain
as we are of so much in this existence, this
botched, cumbersome, much-mended,
not unsatisfactory thing."

From "A Hermit Thrush" by Amy Clampitt

Sweeter after the frost

"...opening itself
as if to eat the air, or speak in cabbage
language of the meanings within meanings..."

From "The Cabbage" by Ruth Stone

***

It's New Years in Central Texas, which means cornbread, and cabbage, and something with pork, and something with dark greens. And a bottle of "lucky champagne" from a dear friend, and time to think about the past years' adventures, and the adventures ongoing and to come. Happy 2013, all - may your year be full of joy, and freedom from want, and full of love and creativity.

Wire frame

"There’s a finer conviction than seamlessness

elicits: the Greeks knew a god
by the clanking behind his descent."

From "Ex Machina" by Linda Gregerson

Washed away

"...dissipating into erosions,
cuts and counter-cuts,

remembered as landscape..."

From "Waiting There" by Michael Anania

***

A bad case of restlessness is settling over me. Slept much of Saturday, so it's time to see where the restlessness leads.

Pith

"A stick a bunch of rags a flower
need no transformation. The hour
given to sweet motion is a soul."

From "Outbreak" by Donald Revell

In which I sprained my ankle and put more time into my marketing consulting business

Pictures and poems to commence shortly, courtesy of a sprained ankle and more time towards my marketing consulting business. Meanwhile, back to that first cup of coffee...and thank you for stopping back by, despite my lack of postings.

Borderlands

"I have seen that it takes in every detail
I can manage concerning the garden wall and its borders."

From "On the Existence of the Soul" by Pattiann Rogers

Angel

"She asks, Is there a map of these gates?

She asks, Is this one called Passages, or is that one to the west?"

From "Autobiography" by Michael Palmer

Mustard

"This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I'd say, What?"

From "The Gate" by Marie Howe

Glaucous

"A color merely, private, ethereal, collecting
Heft in the warp of time."

From "Ovid in America" by Averill Curdy

Insulator

"...only
casting a slight shadow on my table.
Of course I act as though I

haven't seen a thing."

From "Keeping Track of My Genius" by Jack Stewart

Troy

"I think I like this room.
The curtains and the furniture aren’t the same
Of course, but the light comes in the window as it used to..."

From "Picture of Little Letters" by John Koethe

***
I'm back (never really gone, just too busy)...
Hello!

South

"...birds
clamber south, your car
kaputs in a blazing, dusty
nowhere, things happen, and constantly..."

From "Quickly Aging Here" by Denis Johnson

Blown

"They entered the valley, and passed the roads that went
Trackless, the houses blown open..."

From "The Drought" by Gary Soto

Tensile

"...tell me then, supernatural
One, exactly how

Many days I have left to wake into..."

From "When the Gods Go, Half-Gods Arrive" by Lucie Brock-Broido

Fuzzy

"...all ideas settled
In a fuzz of dust under trees..."

From "The Other Tradition" by John Ashbery

***

A lovely long weekend for fuzzy thinking; hope you've been well since I last posted.

Chinked cedar

"Yet what puzzles me the most
Is my unwavering taste
For these dim, weathery ghosts..."

From "After the Rain" by Anthony Hecht

The way through

"...grass snakes like soft signs
in the Russian language disappear
into thickets."

From "To Go to Lvov" by Adam Zagajewski (opens PDF)

Translated by Renata Gorczynska

Captive

"'I have been told that beneath the Throne is an angel in the form of a rooster, with talons of pearl and a breast of green chrysolite.'"

From a translation featured on David Larsen's Writing Gathering Field.

***

As ever, too much to do with work and school - I was up before the rooster crowed.
But I hope you are well, and happy.

Rattlebox

"...seed strewn on the path

like medallions glimpsed the second we—
I mean all of us cold in the twilight—fly."

From "Explaining It" by William Johnson

***

There was a small breeze that day that blew a faint rattlebox from those seedpods.

Sienna bricks

"...the powdery glow floating
the street with evening—saffron, rose, sienna

bricks, matte gold, to be the good steam
clanking pipes, that warm music glazing the panes,
each fugitive moment the heaven we choose to make."

From "Suite for Emily" by Lynda Hull

***

It's hard to find the time to stop and look at things, even in the middle of looking at things, especially in the middle of lots of looking at things.

But I did, there, in Sienna.

Ball Moss

"Words entering almost the sense of touch
Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch—
‘These things are not secrets but mysteries,’ ... "

From "Glanmore Sonnets" by Seamus Heaney

***

Heading far out of town today, back around February 9.

Have fun, stay warm, hug often!

A shard

"I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer."

From "The Gift" by Li-Young Lee

***

It's been a few cold, wet days in a row here. Much ado at work, as ever. Had some friends in over the holidays, and had lots of fun and girl chat while driving around to places like this.

Although the Mur's still not feeling great, he's still able to tease me and the cats. Classes are about to start, and I'll be on the road for business in a couple of weeks. I've got a new lil' pocket camera I am learning to use in preparation for a trip, at the end of the biz trip, to go to the Uffizi and see this up close. I'll be staying with a good friend, who texted "This will be EPIC!"

(I hope it won't be this kind of epic.)

The pic above was taken with the new camera - I'm still getting the hang of it, but it's smaller than a deck of cards, so it'll be fine for travel.

Stay warm, and thanks for stopping by!

Gold and tin

"Now the light will fade

to moonlit water. And in memory I work
to make this lingering accurate and sweet."

From "Ghost Supper" by David Wojahn

***

Long time away, but life (job, school, hubby) sometimes demands deep attention regardless of my hunger for more light, more pixels caught.

I hope all is well with you and yours, and that your days are "lingering...and sweet."

Late afternoon

"...the heart goes out to the end of the rope
it has been throwing into abyss after abyss..."

From "Dragonflies Mating" by Robert Hass

***

A day full of laundry and errands, then collecting myself before our Great Big Company Conference starts. I'm glad you stopped by.

Cornered

"...can you calculate the ratio between wire and window,

between tone and row, copula and carnival
and can you reassemble light from the future-past..."

From "Letter 7" by Michael Palmer

***

Sigh. Too much to do, and I am thinking about the nails I didn't notice at first popping up out of the wood panels.

***

Update Oct. 27. About five days from my company's user conference, and I am pelted with work, as if work were pea-sized hail and the skies were swirling with bruise-colored clouds. Fret not, I'll be back posting fresh pix. Now, where's my coffee...

Polyphemus

"Now let's regret things for a while
That you can't read music
That I never learned Classical languages
That we never grew up, never learned to behave
But devoted ourselves to magic..."

From "The Slop Barrel: Slices of the Paideuma for All Sentient Beings" by Philip Whalen

Sunday in Comfort, Texas

"Love passed me in a blue business suit
and fedora.
His glass cane, hollow and filled with
sharks and whales ...
He wore black
patent leather shoes..."

From "Blue Monday" by Diane Wakoski

***

Long time, no pix...working (as usual) too dang much, reading/writing for school all weekend. But I did get out and wander around on Sunday, so there are more pix to come!

That probably explains it

Indwelling

A catheter, or the holy spirit—both
cannulas (whether fixed in body or soul)
a little reed, the syrinx that channels
something sacred: signs of our wet life,
breath of our unseen transformations.

We turn wine into water, play it out
through that pipe the same way spirit
turns our water to higher proof, distills us:
indwelling, a reverse osmosis of the soul.

***

It's been a busy and crud-filled week. A lousy nasty cold brought me down while I was enmeshed in Giovanni di Paolo's paintings of St. Catherine. (That probably explains the poem.)

Have a good week, all y'all.
I will, once I quit coughing.

Thinking about seeing

Recursive

As in a medieval miniature where space is
tilted and skewed, anchored only by a thread
of ink, a thin rope swelling into snaking patterns
copied from Asiatic silk the color of crushed gems
and beaten gold, the flat screen in front of my hands
tilts and skews, and my thin rope—a thought, that
mayfly of consciousness—flits to pattern again.

The variable pitch and yaw of these buildings
in a Sienese predella panel, the civic landscape
that carries all points of view simultaneously
(the bird’s-eye, the eye-level, the scopic)—I see
myself seeing, wishing for such isometric perspectives
while consumed by my own vanishing points.

Sometimes a poem happens

Inside out

It’s as if I could slip
my fingers through each isarithm
of softwood—cheap paneling
now a matte painting of the wall,
now its memory, now

And on the other side, what I
set in motion: the open field, the low hill,
a crease scored in bent blades of grass
where I forgot the wall stood,
my footsteps blurring as the
grass unbends.

***

Too much going on to wander with a camera, but sometimes a poem happens instead.

Have a lovely week, all y'all.

Vent

"The answer is entropy—how smell works—
little bits of everything—always spinning
off from where they were..."

From "Sublimation Point" by Jason Schneiderman

***

Finished the history class, learned much about Nancy Spero and the paucity of images against war before the Thirty Year's War, and after that 47 page paper and the Ongoing Work Crush, am about to go nose-down on the keyboard.

Don't wake me up, all y'all, at least not until there's fresh coffee...
:-)

Entangled

"...as we fled,
we unbraided our hair from the fan belt of the exhumed engine."

From "The Skyline of a Missing Tooth" by Sherwin Bitsui

***

This week, I finished a short paper on this person's memoirs, among other things.

And you -- how have you been?

Ventana de borrachos

"...that flaw,
that deathward plunge that’s locked inside all form,
till what seems solid floats away, dissolves,
and these poor bastard things, no longer things,
drift back to pure idea."

From "What Light Destroys" by Andrew Hudgins

***

Keeping the energy up. Keeping the lights on. Keeping cool under a white-hot sky. Keeping the questions coming. Keeping one hand on the keyboard, another on a book. Keeping my ideas, day-dreams, options, wishes, and eyes open. Keeping my topic sentences active, and my coffee topped off. Keep well this week, all y'all.

Changing light at 8am

"The lucky trees, to be able
to stand that close. If we talk
too much, we’ll surely miss it."

From "The Delta Parade" by Susan Stewart

***

Sometimes the memory of early morning light, that beaten-gold haze before the heat burns off the air's moisture, is enough to help me through a week.

Glyphs

"How many years did I
beg it, implore it, not to break?
I knew each nick and scratch by heart..."

From "Crusoe in England" by Elizabeth Bishop

***

More readin' and ritin' to do on a holiday weekend.
The air is thick, still and humid -- Hurricane Alex's expiring breath moving up from South Texas.
Have a peaceful week, all y'all.

Almost

"Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be

A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,
As in the division of grace..."

From "Paradoxes and Oxymorons" by John Ashbery

***

Almost:
Too tired to post.
Completely covered in cat fur.
Ready to head to bed -- must get some rest before BBQ for breakfast at Snow's!

Have a good week, everyone.
Here's hoping I find some nice rusty things for pix.

Drive-by

"In the future, I imitate an imagined trumpet sound
Or the brilliant purple words of a man or woman I haven’t met yet..."

From "Very Strong February" by Bernadette Mayer

***

One big fat dream last night, of myself and a friend bobbing in the middle of the Pacific ocean, nothing to see except water and incredibly tall waves that never crested. We rode the waves up, then down into the troughs, and finally saw a tiny island, an atoll really, far off.

The waves pushed us there, and the island was not much bigger than a small room.
But the very few people on it were friendly.

I hope your week was a good one; I hope this week brings you lots of brilliant purple words and large, benign waves.

Behind Ginny's Little Longhorn

"Wires and pipes, snapped off at the roots, quiver.

Well, that is what life does. I stare
A moment longer..."

From "An Urban Convalescence" by James Merrill

***

I feel a little like this truck. Or is it that I feel more like those clouds? Difficult to say, but I will say this about James Merrill.

A number of years ago, when I lived in New York City, I heard that James Merrill was going to read some of his poems someplace downtown, I can't recall where. Of course I was going -- there was no way I was NOT going.

I was waiting for the bus that would take me downtown when two young men came near. One of them began talking to me and handed me an invitation to a church. He urged me to go to their service that night. I told him I couldn't -- I needed to see and hear a poet read some poems, thank you very much. Besides, wasn't art a form of church?

He got a little huffy, and waved towards the crowd of rush-hour working folks crossing the street, an inimitably world-weary hustle and flow:
"Do those people look happy? They need God to be happy, not art!"

"Ah," I said, "their problem is that they have too little art -- if they only read more poetry and looked at more paintings, they'd all be much happier!"

My unnamed accoster snorted in scorn while his partner-in-proselytization could barely stifle his giggles. The bus pulled up, and I said, "Last chance -- I'll go to your church with you both tonight, but you have to go to the poetry reading with me now!"

I got on the bus; they stayed on the pavement.

Merrill was splendid, magical -- he arrived swathed in an elegant red-lined cape and read his beautiful, ormolu verse in a voice that made them seem the most natural things in the world to say.

And when I left...I was happy.

I hope you're happy. And if not, let's meet here and look for more art.

Low heaven

"Extravagant
ailanthus, the courtyard’s poverty tree is spike
and wing, slate-blue..."

From "Ornithology" by Lynda Hull

***

Reading for work, then reading for class...from the changing interface of sales and marketing to the Prague Spring to thinking about Spero's helicopters.

Thank goodness there's a cat asleep next to me.

Have a good week, all y'all.