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.