light

He could fill structures of

threat with a light like the earliest olive oil. I began to understand nature
as something seamed and deep into which one plunged, going dark.

Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband (from III)

Agnes' Song

How is it over there?

How lonely is it?

Is it still glowing red at sunset?

Are the birds still singing on the way to the forest?

Can you receive the letter I dared not send?

Can I convey the confession I dared not make?

Will time pass and roses fade?

Now it's time to say goodbye

Like the wind that lingers and then goes, just like shadows

To promises that never came, to the love sealed till the end

To the grass kissing my weary ankles

And to the tiny footsteps following me

It's time to say goodbye

Now as darkness falls

Will a candle be lit again?

Here I pray nobody shall cry and for you to know how deeply I loved you

The long wait in the middle of a hot summer day

An old path resembling my father's face

Even the lonesome wild flower shyly turning away

How deeply I loved

How my heart fluttered at hearing your faint song

I bless you

Before crossing the black river

With my soul's last breath

I am beginning to dream a bright sunny morning

again I awake, blinded by the light

and meet you standing by me.

"Poetry," dir. Lee Chang-dong

what gives it value is fear

Santo Domingo de la Calzada
29th of June

As we move into Castile we are accompanied on either side of the road by aqueducts and other more modern systems of irrigation, for the water grows less. Like pastries of red lava the rocks rise in visible layers. Fields are no longer dark and edged closed with woods but stretch out and roll away beneath the eye, sectioned in areas of ocher and amber and red. Nine months of winter, three months of hell is the proverbial description of climate on the Meseta. No dark green wheat riding in waves under the wind here, as there was all through Navarre. No wind at all. That smell is light, ready to fall on us. One day closer to the plain of Leon.

We live by waters breaking out of the heart.

My Cid loves heat and is very elated. He rarely gets thirsty. "I was born in the desert." Twice a day, at meals, he drinks a lot of wine, staring at the glass in genial amazement as it empties itself again and again. He grows heavier and heavier like a piece of bread soaking, or a fish that floats dreamily out of my fingers down deeper and deeper in the tank, turning round now and then to make dim motions at me with its fins, as if in recognition, but in fact it does not recognize me--gold shadows flash over it, out of reach, gone. Who is this man? I have no idea. The more I watch him, the less I know. What are we doing here, and why are our hearts invisible? Once last winter when we were mapping out the pilgrimage on his kitchen table, he said to me, "Well, what are you afraid of, then?" I said nothing. "Nothing." Not an answer. What would your answer be?

We think we live by keeping water caught in the trap of the heart. Coger en un trampa is a Spanish idiom meaning "to catch in a trap." Coger por el buen camino is another, constructed with the same verb; it means "to get the right road." And yet to ensnare is not necessarily to take the right road.

Afraid I don't love you enough to do this.

Pilgrims were people who got the right verb.

*

Villa Major del Rio
30th of June

The town of Villa Major del Rio, My Cid observes, is three ways a lie. "It is not a town, it is not big and there is no river." The observations are correct. Notwithstanding, we lunch, and over lunch a conversation--without action, in which he does not believe. I would relate the conversation and outline the theory of his belief but theories elude me unless I write them down at the time. Instead, I was watching his dreamy half smile. It floats up through his face from the inside, like water filling an aquarium, when he talks about God. For his conversations about action (we have had more than one) are all descriptions of God, deep nervous lover's descriptions.

I should have taken photographs. A theory of action is hard to catch, and I know only glimpses of his life--for instance, at home he makes his own bread (on Saturday morning, very good bread). He thought about being a priest (at one time). He could have made a career on the concert stage, and instead built a harpsichord (red) in the dining room. The harpsichord goes unmentioned in Villa Major del Rio. I am telling you this because a conversation is a journey, and what gives it value is fear. You come to understand travel because you have had conversations, not vice versa. What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.

Anne Carson, "The Anthropology of Water"

Study of Gneiss Rock, Glenfinlas

John Ruskin, 1853. Pen and ink and wash with Chinese ink on paper

the sky bronze, the earth iron

The LORD will make the pestilence cling to you until it has consumed you off the land that you are entering to possess. The LORD will afflict you with consumption, fever, inflammation, with fiery heat and drought, and with blight and mildew; they shall pursue you until you perish. The sky over your head shall be bronze, and the earth under you iron. The LORD will change the rain of your land into powder, and only dust shall come down upon you from the sky until you are destroyed. The LORD will cause you to be defeated before your enemies; you shall go out against them one way and flee before them seven ways. You shall become an object of horror to all the kingdoms of the earth. Your corpses shall be food for every bird of the air and animal of the earth, and there shall be no one to frighten them away. The LORD will afflict you with the boils of Egypt, with ulcers, scurvy, and itch, of which you cannot be healed. The LORD will afflict you with madness, blindness, and confusion of mind; you shall grope about at noon as blind people grope in darkness, but you shall be unable to find your way; and you shall be continually abused and robbed, without anyone to help.
Deuteronomy 28:15-29

layers and connections between layers

This is where we learned love and where we learned depth and where
we learned layers and where we learned connections between
layers.

We learned and we loved the black sandshell, the ash, the american
bittern, the harelip sucker, the yellow bullhead, the beech,
the great blue heron, the dobsonfly larva, the water penny
larva, the birch, the redhead, the white catspaw, the elephant
ear, the buckeye, the king eider, the river darter, the sauger,
the burning bush, the common merganser, the limpet, the
mayfly nymph, the cedar, the turkey vulture, the spectacle
case, the flat floater, the cherry, the red tailed hawk, the
longnose gar, the brook trout, the chestnut, the killdeer,
the river snail, the giant floater, the chokeberry, gray catbird,
the rabbitsfoot, the slenderhead darter, the crabapple, the
american robin, the creek chub, the stonefly nympth,
the dogwood, the warbling vireo, the sow bug, the elktoe,
the elm, the marsh wren, the monkeyface, the central
mudminnow, the fir, the gray-cheeked thrush, the white bass,
the predaceous diving beetle, the hawthorn, the scud, the
salamander mussel, the hazelnut, the warbler, the mapleleaf,
the american eel, the hemlock, the speckled chub, the whirligig
beetle larva, the hickory, the sparrow, the caddisfly larva,
the fluted shell, the horse chestnut, the wartyback, the white
heelsplitter, the larch, the pine grosbeak, the brook stickleback,
the river redhorse, the locust, the ebonyshelf, the giant water
bug, the maple, the eastern phoebe, the white sucker, the creek
heelsplitter, the mulberry, the crane fly larva, the mountain
madtom, the oak, the bank swallow, the wabash pigtoe, the
damselfly larva, the pine, the stonecat, the kidneyshell,
the plum, the midge larva, the eastern sand darter, the rose,
the purple wartyback, the narrow-winged damselfly, the
spruce, the pirate perch, the threehorn wartyback, the sumac,
the black fly larva, the redside dace, the tree-of-heaven, the
orange-foot pimpleback, the dragonfly larva, the walnut,
the gold fish, the butterfly, the striped fly larva, the willow,
the freshwater drum, the ohio pigtoe, the warmouth, the
mayfly nymph, the clubshell.

And this was just the beginning of the list.

Our hearts took on many things.

Juliana Spahr, "Gentle Now, Don't Add to Heartache"

the pale king (1)

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat: shattercane, lamb's-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak's thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.

Some crows come overhead then, three or four, not a murder, on the wing, silent with intent, corn-bound for the pasture's wire beyond which one horse smells at the other's behind, the lead horse's tail obligingly lifted. Your shoes' brand incised in the dew. An alfalfa breeze. Socks' burrs. Dry scratching inside a culvert. Rusted wire and tilted posts more a symbol of restraint than a fence per se. NO HUNTING. The shush of the interstate off past the windbreak. The pasture's crows standing at angles, turning up patties to get at the worms underneath, the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail. Read these.

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

Pray for us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

T.S. Eliot, "Ash Wednesday"

Poetry as a cemetary.

A cemetery of faces, hands, gestures. A cemetery of clouds, colors of the sky, a graveyard of winds, branches, jasmine (the jasmine from Swidnik), the statue of a saint from Marseilles, a single poplar over the Black Sea, a graveyard of moments and hours, burnt offerings of words. Eternal rest be yours in words, eternal rest, eternal light of recollection.

Cemeteries of sunsets, running with arms spread, a child’s short dress, winter, snowstorms, footsteps on the stairs, tears, a letter with a serious confession, silver faces, the shoemaker’s stall, parting, pain, sorrow. Everything preserved, buried in amber tombs of words. The sea, grief trickling from someone’s eyes, parting; faith in God, arrivals and departures, loneliness heavier than death, sweet as death. Anxiety and peace. The streets of cities. A monk’s belly bumps up against a tourist in catacombs. First communion. First love. First storm at sea. First night.

A dog’s eyes, eyes of the beloved, unclosed eyes of a dead man, glazed with one tear. Barrows of memory. Mummies, the amputated hands and feet of statues. A deer emerges from the grove, stops and stares. A footbridge across the river in the flutter of geese and bare feet, flowering fields. Grandfather’s death, his moustache in the coffin. A dog’s howl.

Since the priest doesn’t come running with his holy oil every time a leaf falls. The collective grave of childhood, where apple cores lie, little skeletons, a dead friend. Basia Bartmanska, her father’s angry brow, the grandfather’s hand given to kiss, the longing for holiness, nettles, a country outhouse, spiders, boys’ tickling on a suburb’s dark steps.

That sun and that rain, mama, mama, that sky and trees. The springs are ever more tightly wound, I can’t turn them to the end.

My mother, who dies in my childhood dream, my mother who dies and I watch as she dies, and I remain alive, whole, almost indifferent.

Kindhearted Mother, protectoress of people.

And so many lives, like the rings of a tree, like geological strata. I lost God in the darkness of my twenty years. Saint Anthony, patron of lost things, help me find my lost Lord God! Saint Anthony, stand in the courtyard and gather alms for the poor.

Anna Kamieńska, "Industrious Amazement: A Notebook"; tr. Clare Cavanagh