So I thought I had it made.
I thought I was the pale figure the landscape I was born in,
but could be transformed by making it out of paper
as if it were tissue collage.
And I thought well, the paper will be the ultimate suitor.
That's where I can go next and of course the epigraph
is always chosen last.
And the epigraph for this book is from a letter
that Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brothers.
And it says, "I had begun to sign canvases
but I soon stopped because it seemed too foolish.
On one seascape, there is a clamorous red signature
because I wanted a red note in the green."
So I thought I had my identity down pat, the red signature.
Not because I think that I'm so important
but because I wanted it for the sake of the design
this sense of form that Alison was talking about.
But then that horizon that ends that book when it comes closer,
that arrives at arm's length.
The way a painter holds up a thumb to get scale.
But when things start coming close
and they start coming to houses, then what you get
are doors, windows, porches, liminal places
where one thing becomes another, where inside becomes outside.
And the exuberance of being out the lone figure in landscape
with all of the people nicely ensconced
underneath their names whether they're gravestones
yet or not, the memorial impulse of poetry is to put them there.
What I found instead that was my life became tumultuous
and that the position of the suitor on the porch
comes knocking on the door.
Somebody looking out the window that I
was going to have to name that figure the penultimate suitor
not prepared yet to say what might be or who might be,
the ultimate suitor.
And so these window figures started cropping up.
Just a short poem to give you a flavor.
"Man in top half of dutch door."
Think about a dutch door as a door becoming a window so
that this part of you can go out forever
and ever, but from the waist down you feel constricted.
"Man in top half of dutch door."
"He stays inside for indiscernibility
like tears beneath closed lids.
Closed lids describe a shallow scalloped border.
The kitten's muse describe a shallow scalloped border.
Dusk erases chances, moots a day,
invites a second widening of sight and sound
and of his need to convey himself
expanding broad rotations."