Specimens, Days

  Unnamed in the figure of shadow Not without a name, but stripped syllables, The bright contours of phoneme reft From the curved seraph, but the thing Still itself, there where we’ve pointed.  The names gathered, some attempt  At hiding tantamount to a hope for Disappearance altogether. Take my name Then hear from my own keening A song spill out still from my lips.  There were already worlds where you Wouldn’t look. Call them shadows & pluck from them names to kindle  Fires, but nameless or no here they Remain, grave & luminous & Seeing you * I hadn't read this since writing it four months ago, & it's funny, at first I was appalled that I had used the word 'name' over & over, like some candied jewel stuck in my mouth the whole time, but then I think it's sort of perfect, given the context. How it is rendered into anonymity while also becoming singular. How it becomes a choice & a thing sought. I love that subconsciously when you write a ...

  It is all inchoate grasping & conclusion Freezes wooden, lifeless, Daphne in arrested Motion, a laurel swaying soft over the bank Of the creek, footfall pattering into susurrus & birdsong, the occasional tumble of stone Under gathered current. Then we forget. We think of a place As only a place, fixed, extra-dynamic hints of change nominally seasonal.  A thumbprint holds a thousand deaths.  Our microscopic lives Humming with the fine filament of preposterous Hopes. To matter. We matter. We are & so We should. The creek coughs where slow ice Jigged its curvature. A mountain sloughs ten feet Of modest elevation. Every leaf desiccates & lets go.  We are layer upon layer upon layer Of extinction & gradual erasure, & nowhere, nowhere do We look down to notice.

  The daunting thing can be the consideration of consistency as an imperative. I wonder if that notion doesn’t arise from the subtextual branding of everything that enters our consciousness, or the similarly capitalist idea that an entity has to grow exponentially from its own foundations, without regard for tangential thinking or discursive breaks or the sudden onset of boredom or the multifarious interventions of life. Like in order to be credible you have to be credibly one thing or justify within the vernacular of that one thing your excursions into fancy or wonder or retreat. Return to your expectation of   yourself. Artist as monolith, art as product hustled through the anticipation of its witness or consumption. I guess what I’m saying is I hope to intentionally act in opposition to a unifying principle. It would be ideal if I didn’t even like half the things I devise half the time. I want the antagonisms of discovery without the murder of their dissection, to borrow ...

  We have walked upon the taut & shifting crest of the wave, as from some far sea, compass-lost, the din of ocean-swell underfoot & the brocade of stars flung in reflection from trough back to sky. The horizon was a muted thing, a blur between grey & grey, flashing matte color like a starling in shade. One thinks of life as wanting, as tending toward rest, as if once unburdened of the velocities that buoy & compel us, its roots would writhe into Reason & its flowering would pull in the scented breath of the world. I have wondered at this, & been given cause to often. I tumble as much through space as I do through time. We are given to understand them both as linear, but they grow to enwreathe me, a kind of bird’s nest wherein the bend of having been sits across the diameter & sees itself grown longer, run wild, tucked between past & future. I think about ending up here, in Alaska again, in this town of twenty or so that felt instantaneously familiar....

We live in Bettles now, with no phone & very limited access to internet. Drop me a line at PO Box 26046, Bettles Field, AK, 99726 & I promise I'll write you back. In the meantime, here are a few things I've thought about since arriving. Hope you all three are well & sending my love.  * All morning, the snow fell thick & wet, clumping & carpeting the roofs. Blue sky pokes through now in the afternoon heat, & drip edges shed curtains of melt. The skies here are epics written in slow time, their characters clashing across tableaus of unimaginable distance. The Yukon Flats & Kanuti form an arrow that points a few dozen miles north of here, & to the west, north & east, the mountains hem the arrow in, crested white, gauzy across the country. In Bettles, the old gravel pit is a swollen lake & the migratory ducks & shorebirds whittle away their time. Godwits & kittiwakes flit overhead while snipes out by the float pond stutter along end...

The cedar waxwings have moved along. The cormorants still flock in the gloaming, pointed west, with their numbers reducing by the day. Herons seem to bunch together, weaving in & out of one another’s company in the spring, displaying perhaps a bit less timidity when the kids rush to the windows or porch railings to point in wonder. & lately, the hummingbirds have returned. They hover at the windows, looking at the drawings of monsters Ada did to deter the prior passerine crowd from running into the glass. They seem genuinely interested, spending a moment at each drawing before moving politely to the next. & all the birds compassed north have flown but us, but we go about the business of packing, unburdening ourselves of more things, selling off the car, trying to organize what we can in the face of so many variables & unknowns.  The spring in Texas has been windy, almost without exception or cease. Yellow pollen coats every surface, but the flowers erupt in kaleidos...