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