distance is a woman i must cover at night

i posted a long entry this morning at 2:51 am, and deleted it at 2:57 because it was...well, bad. it was about not being able to sleep, driving in a blizzard, and how john haines says that contemporary american poetry lacks the "fluent familiarity" with the natural world once common and perhaps even necessary, and the end of a tradition of poetry informed by "centuries of foot travel, from walking the land," not driving through it. it was about different ways of believing that traversing distance is a matter of will, not space. h and i have been discussing light and dark, in a literary and emotional sense, and how 19th century arctic explorers equated darkness with immobility (spufford, 80-3). there is some cultural tendency to conflate stillness with stagnancy (literally and emotionally).
i thought of this poem, its naturalist proficiency if not fluency, and sense of movement made possible by combustion engines. the flora and color scheme are entirely different from anything in my immediate surroundings, but the sentiment is the same.

Red Hills and Sky


My grandmother is dirt and I am desert.

Dusk. The datura unnerves me.
I ride out to violate the baked earth.

Hear the gray sage, how its hairs bristle in wind.
I know distance is a woman I must cover at night,
smoothing her clay shawl.

I ride with my angry kiss in my mouth
until I am forced to stop:

red hollyhuck against bright blue larkspur,
tell me who has not been quieted by this.

(jane miller)

we are cold and disquieting at heart

in his review of john ashbery's hotel lautréamont, "in and out of the loop," john haines offers the following excerpt as an example of what is wrong with contemporary poetry ("could a poetry like this, with its constant shifting of images and viewpoints, have been written before the age of television? this seems to me to be a question worth asking, for reading these poems is uncannily like watching a series of sound bites, of news images projected and then withdrawn, to be immediately replaced by others totally unrelated to what one had just been watching and listening to.") i liked it.

(from "American Bar," ashbery, 1992)

. . .
We bake a dozen kinds of muffins every day
yet we are cold and disquieting at heart.
I fear for his sciatica, though
we were never lovers.
Let me memorialize this mattress, M.
le Comte, . . .
. . .
In the casual track of a zipper my penis
once got stuck, and it's been like that ever since:
feet stop where no snare lives, the best
is to die down and desist. Perhaps life is better
near the Arctic Circle,
. . .

(fables and distances, j. haines, 1996)

call these phenomena or pinpoints, remote as the glittering trash of heaven

the moon on thursday, just north of healy, and some recent cuteness, because i am at a loss for words.

for a dance that has no time

i've always loved the colors of halloween but have so rarely visually documented it, which is maybe better. i remember one halloween night in high school in flag a shirtless blue man juggling fire in the square and i painted it 6 or 7 times (i was very concerned with a strange sort of perfection then, and it seemed crucial to record the night, and maybe, since i'm mentioning it now, it was). in tucson it was not the 31st but día de los muertos that mattered: flames and flowers and painted calaveras, drum beats filling what felt like the whole city. last night, everything was backlit by the moon reflecting on snow and ice, colors and shadows against silvery blue. 4 golden paper lanterns lit from deneki lake and floating upwards, and later, emergency flares spilling red onto the ice. inside, as the musicians played "angeline the baker," and nan told me through her painted zombie lips how important she thinks it is to take time, as much or little as feels right, for yourself and your sanity and how the north lends itself to that in a way nowhere else does, and i ate pomegranate cheesecake with my fingers, i decided that if i ever start painting again, documenting the reds in that room would be a good place to start.
i walked down the hill without a headlamp to my just above freezing cabin around 2:30 in my head, 1:30 to the satellites, and the world was radiating a cold moonlit fire that has been described a million times and better than i ever could but still not good enough, and when i started to freeze in my frida kalho costume, standing on the trail at 8 below, i went inside, built a fire, and sat in the non-dark dark with fast cooling tea and wrote an email that was kind of about how sometimes, choosing to be cold and alone is the best thing you can do for yourself, but mostly about fire and how i'll never sleep in my car below 0 and i'm ok with that.
the night before, there was a square dance. i spent a lot of time looking at the ceiling trying not to laugh or at nothing in particular and laughing my ass off. and tonight, the moon is even brighter, and for the sake of nostalgia and superstition i lit a virgen de guadelupe candle in the window.

autumn lies open on a table

my camera returned from its travels, and it snowed.

-----------------------------
anita has been writing about silence, and lent me more john haines:

Listening in October

In the quiet house
a lamp is burning
where the book of autumn
lies open on a table.

There is tea with milk
in heavy mugs,
brown raisin cake, and thoughts
that stir the heart
with the promises of death.

We sit without words,
gazing past the limit
of fire, into the towering
darkness...

There are silences so deep
you can hear
the journeys of the soul,
enormous footsteps
downward in a freezing earth.

traveler, there is no path. paths are made by walking.

(antonio machado, qtd. by annie proulx, fine just the way it is)
--------------------------
i was talking friday night about my brief stint as a wannabe undergrad revolutionary, about waking up on march 20th, 2003, in ottawa, and having a somewhat serious conversation with charlie about marriage, canada, and expatriation, but i had a paper due in tucson on monday and so we made pancakes instead, and about the night we bought U-locks from wal-mart to lock ourselves to the UA administrative building. when i voiced some ethical concerns about this particular expenditure, i was told "really, erica, where else do you think we'll find cheap bike locks in the middle of the night?" which seemed like the most ironic corporate TV ad ever and marked the beginning of a long and painful disillusionment with a lot of things. "i didn't really hear much about the war that winter, but i definitely wasn't contributing much to capitalism either," b said, and talked about the eastern sierras rising straight out of nothing, and i thought about the gradual understanding of the different ways people--americans--can choose to not participate, and which are effective, and the gray areas of what "effective" means. later, before falling asleep, i wrote the beginning of a poem about seasons, daylight, and flies on the window on a scrap of paper. i can't read half of what i wrote--i didn't have my glasses, the light was bad, and the pen was dried out--but it felt good to follow the instinct as soon as the words came, even if i did feel a bit like anais nin or jenny the annoying indecisive girl on the L word. but they wouldn't then go pee outside naked at 20 degrees, so...

introducing

there's a new blog in that list over to your right: matt rotando's. i try to acknowledge it when i add someone. an excerpt from this recent entry:

Last night,
before bed,
I made a grilled cheese sandwich.
If you had been there,
I'd have given you half.

Shit. I would have made you a whole one.
--------------------
check it out.
and on that note, i'm out of bread again and made 50 flour tortillas today.

the buddha-nature, all but coyote

last wednesday i rode my bike from teklanika to sable. there were coyotes on the road. and, for cassalyn: deborah!