eclipse me

ssshhh

from John Cage's

Lecture on Nothing

I am here    ,    and there is nothing to say                 .

            If among you are

those who wish to get somewhere      ,        let them leave at

any moment           .                     What we re-quire                          is

silence                      ;          but what silence requires 

                 is              that I go on talking   .

                                                                           Give any one thought

                        a push                      :         it falls down easily

;             but the pusher         and the pushed         pro-duce            that enter-

tainment                                              called              a dis-cussion                .

                                                               Shall we have one later                      ?

merge

Re-reading The Sound and the Fury and finding the experience haunting. This is the third time. The book seems to rise up at crossroads. As I wind through Faulkner's streams of thought, I encounter the ghosts of old selves, shed like snake skin behind me. I touch the delicate papery self of high school, which nearly disintegrates; rub my thumb across the bookmark of a later, thicker skin.  And the characters too rise up in new shapes. Benjy isn't as compelling. Quentin and Jason too present. I've not yet reached Caddy. The book's power seems diminished. Perhaps that's because the Compsons aren't as exotic as in my younger imagination. I know families like this and sadder now.  So familiar, not diminished. Now, reading this is like looking through a photo album you pull out from time to time.  As opposed to a guidebook to that far off place you'd yet to visit.

Today, to follow my own streaming thoughts, I worked with the fourth graders on poems they're writing, based on a stunning exhibition at the museum where I teach as a visiting writer. We were looking at ways to use verbs and nouns. Later their teacher told me the school's writing curriculum doesn't include lessons on identifying parts of speech. So the kids don't know the names of the words they are using. This makes me sad. How can they use language if they don't know how to name it? 

 

valentine

more jean

from Little Boat

Maria Gravida

Then the gold mother began her touching me

With her long brown face & hands

She tickled me & told me I was beautiful

She held me in the ikon & we gazed

We had a pretty goldfinch   death   salavation

Love was strong as death    Peacocks walked by

Blue immortality       Finches played in black branches

Souls around the cross     It was death in life

Our gold earth gravida

Not a casket but a darkroom for our love

The herma wrought of silver, gilded in fire

Gold mother around me inside me gravida

wash out

Face to Face

In February life stood still.

The birds refused to fly and the soul

grated against the landscape as a boat

chafes against the jetty where it's moored.

The tree were turned away. The snow's depth

measured by the stubble poking through.

The footprints grew old on the ice-crust.

Under tarpaulin, language was being broken down.

Suddenly, something approaches the window.

I stop working and look up.

The colours blaze. Everything turns around.

The earth and I spring at each other.

By Tomas Transtromer

(translated b Robin Robertson)

february

Psalm

Veritas sequitur...

In the small beauty of the forest

The wild deer bedding down --

That they are there!

Their eyes

Effortless, the soft lips

Nuzzle and the alien small teeth

Tear at the grass

The roots of it

Dangle from their mouths

Scattering earth in the strange woods.

They who are there.

Their paths

Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them

Hang in the distances

of sun

The small nouns

crying faith

In this in which the wild deer

Startle, and stare out.

George Oppen

Edward Hirsch writes that Oppen's epigraph comes from a phrase by Thomas Aquinas, "Veritas sequitur esse rei"-- Truth follows from the being of things.

fold

da Vinci's drapery studies

the part of the fold that is farthest

from its course will turn most 

to its original form

beautiful folds shall be made around the figure

where the limbs assemble

and pull the drapery between themselves

the draperies thin, thick, new, old,

with folds broken and pleated

soft light, shadows obscure and less

obscure, with or without

reflections, definite or indistinct

according to distances and colors;

and the garments according to the rank

of those who wear them

long or short

fluttering or 

stiff

field work

I was out wandering recently. Lost kind of.  It was cold and early. I  went looking. Here and there. I was sight seeing. What did I hope to see? Some beautiful words. It's been a long time and I haven't encountered them so I was listening too. To neon and the clamor, the jostle. Signage. At a museum I found bits of stuff. I wrote it down. In the city I heard people talking about the usual. The usual flew out of their mouths, you know, where to eat, work. I guess I hoped to find revelation but that didn't happen. Which is fine since I'm not going to the AWP, where there will indeed be revelations. I then got to thinking about Emily Dickinson.  About her life as a loaded gun, which seems like the way it goes when you're wandering.  

fullish

on a night like this, I'm thinking about this:

from Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along...

freeze

Cold here and sharp. A deep chill settles.

I've been thinking about single words, 

the sound of one 

word, the variety in pitch

between freeze and thaw

and lull. How pitch can evoke meaning.

Been thinking about color 

what happens to color in cold.