Don't know.
I think I'm going to read a long piece
and then finish with two other poems.
It's called "A Context of a Wave."
And it's prose.
It's kind of a daily writing.
And it was written in Galisteo, New Mexico, where I was living.
And Galisteo is a basin and there's the far distance to see
and there's a mountain called the Wave.
And that's all there is, there's very few elements.
And in a way, I use this moon and the sun and the mountain--
I use these elements to talk about what a person's
relationship to a place is.
But I was really thinking about the question of--
I read it-- oh, Alan Davies had written it.
Like, what is the connection between literature and life?
Which I had never--
I never had asked myself.
And in a way, I was talking about that
by talking about what's the connection with a place.
I was also thinking about values, values here.
And this was written over a month, November and December.
It's called "A Context of a Wave."
It starts out November 5.
"You could be thinking about your physical placement.
What can be a continuum and what is chance?
You place yourself innately on a mesa.
There are blue hills at each horizon.
The light falls copiously onto your open space.
The path of the sun and the planets
are proportioned around you.
The source of the balance is a sense perception.
Your perception of your location is not contingent,
but accords with an idea of location inside you
that turns in you like a gyroscope as you are moving.
I believe in this sense perception of place
because I experience it.
It may be a sense of the shape of a space or of the balance
of features of this space.
Or it may be a sense of a point on the Earth in relation
to forces in the Earth, which may be
affected by stars and planets.
Or it may be in relation to stars and planets."
This is the 9th.
"So that the place would sit in me,
it's wide space with sun as what it would
be in my memory of this time.
And how it would be perceived is a matrix
of how you were with some people around you.
Not agents, but catalyst or fuel for the perception of light
on a wide space.
So free as to be impersonal in the company,
implacable and impersonal.
10.
She would remember that it was a place of the wind.
She would think that she would remember
the sight of sun and light without sound or with value.
But her body is pushed and drawn on by the force of wind
on the ridge every day so that someday she would remember
that she had lived in wind.
The wind can be in the future, a direction,
as if there were time because it comes from somewhere.
Because it draws you somewhere, it
is the time or space that is the next thing somewhere
among the materials of a space or at a time.
Because it might be seen as an expression of the forces
making it, which push on you or draw from you.
It is an expression too, everything it is not.
And you are reminded you are what it is not.
And this expression abstains from you
as a space when the wind is pushing all night
or on a sunny day against the windows
and walls of your house.
Then this expression of being what something is not
joins you with a piece of leaning yellow grass in low sun
or it abstains you from the expression
as if you are more becoming in your mind what you are looking
at than what you are feeling.
11.
You would be able to see the meaning
or whole of the space between the objects
on the table, which before had been
random space between the fork and the salt crystal.
Now you can see the meaning or the whole
of the space between rods of illuminated streaks of clouds
at sunset, zooming this way and that, and the volume
and vector between them.
From you to the horizon gains a meaning,
something happens to you.
It is time moving.
And you can see them as a whole thing and not the space
between one cloud and another that
appear on the same plane because of the same color of light
on them.
12.
We walked in the dry riverbed.
Water had left the sand in sweeps of lines and currents,
fronds of tamarack drifted in.
I want to call it pollen of tamarack drifting into patterns
of sand made by currents of water
like drifts of events in time.
But it is more like the bits of tamarack
frond broken by the current and drifting into patterns
or record was the time.
Because of there being something besides a pattern
to perceive time by means of.
A skin of tufts of yellow grasses
on a hillside through off the lateral light
and through down their delicate shadows.
The flank of a hill suggesting a living creature.
13.
You can see the complexity of autumn plants and trees
in the canyon below you.
It is late autumn, the yellow and brown jumble
of the foliage.
Most of the leaves have fallen from the trees and bushes
into heaps and drifts on either side of the stream.
We are accustomed to think of disorganization
and of increasing disorganization
as a vector toward entropy.
The pleasurable complexity of matter in the canyon
would seem to be entropic except for its beauty.
It looks like death.
It seems entropic, but it is not entropic.
As biological death may not be.
And I wonder if the beauty is an innate apprehension
of the ongoingness or other than entropy of that sight.
14.
I see the honey moon rise from a bare horizon
after the sunset behind a mountain.
I was waiting for the moon.
It was a test and not a knowledge
of the movement of the risings by which
I am trying to judge where I am on this plane.
We are trying to understand if the moon sets
in a different place than the sun.
The sun which is moving and moving down the horizon.
Soon its colored glow will silhouette
a mountain called the Wave.
15.
How this relates to your seeing the moon rise in your rearview
mirror driving west on an empty road home.
She had wanted to see the gap between the moon
and the horizon, the space that would be into infinity.
And then she would be seeing the moon
in the mirror surrounded by gaps in direction and in distance.
And these gaps have to do with this writing and not
with situation or place.
21.
You see streaks of clouds in the sky,
a sky evenly striped with clouds from top
to bottom, which you leave.
And then you see two long plumes of clouds in another sky that
is lighter and bluer.
This sky stretches over you always,
but it is a sky that looks different from there than here.
The composition of the atmosphere,
the angle of the sun distinguish the blue factor.
I want to say content of the sky.
I want to say the skies of two places have two contents.
You would want to examine the content in regard to its value.
And I don't know if this has anything to do with place.
23.
The sky is continuous with the other places.
And yet when I look at the afterglow of the sunset,
I see a rim of layered clouds on the horizon
all around me, a rim or limit of this sky.
Just above the rim, my eye could go into deep space
or my eye could go into infinity.
But the line of my glance will not meet the persons
in the other place looking of a moral content that
would not be comparable.
24.
If we would be thinking about what
a particular moon or a sky as an event has to do with anything
I'm writing, and also the relationship of event
to location in what I'm writing.
What does it mean to try and see something in Galisteo
to write about?
If you're talking about place in words,
not place in being, which is an orientation of being.
Whereas place in words can be a sort of focus of being,
or a little sieve through which another person can
focus the interest of about.
The interest or pleasure of a dark volcanic rock
in the riverbed, its shadow, your suspicion
that it moves from side to side when no one is there.
What interest is, which is not experience,
but part of the body that might fuel interest or be
part of its fuel.
27.
For example, you would be tracking
where you are as a sighting of what your content would be,
time as nature.
The sun sets farther and farther left
on the small mountain range.
So the sunset glow begins to approach your favorite Wave.
Favorite being a content and also approach of a glow.
When she cannot see what the place is,
is that part of the end of the time,
such as the yellow grasses have gone dull by the end
of November?
The dullness of the lapse of location in her?
Or is it the grasses themselves?
He seats himself after a ways and waits there
for your return to accompany you because you have gone out
of your place.
The place of a low sun that illuminates
a fan of experience of cholla and sage beyond and beyond.
28.
It would close in on you, the mist lowers over the Wave.
The cloud has come down, diffused light deepens
the colors of the basin.
So now you can make out the fissure of a little river
canyon cutting the plane, a rust red below mist
hovering close to the ground.
As if a cloth has shaken down a saturation of content,
a blank saturation before you.
Now you think in the morning what
the value of the saturated space means, emulsified
or dropletted for now and for what has happened.
29.
Where the moon is, that would speak the cycles
of what she is saying.
Then some days pass and she doesn't know where the moon is.
Winter clouds lower onto the plain, gray and thick
in the cold.
She would be thinking about the description as a means
to content.
But it is as if she can't see far enough now.
There was one line of light on the distant part of the plain
as sun broke out between clouds for a few minutes.
And that would be her content.
Because of her moral or emotional stance
about sunlight.
It was brief and it is what she can remember.
30.
You see snow as mist on the plane.
I hear snowfall on the tin roof.
I think the time passes because my mood is changing.
No horizon.
You look and you can't see anything to remember.
You feel the moisture and the warmth of the air.
You feel that it is very dark now.
It is impenetrable to your feeling about the right thing
to do.
So what is the relationship of the horizon
with the right thing to do?
The horizon is the edge of the body or the edge
of the eye you look out from into space of possibilities
to choose from.
Or space of a clarity in which to decide the color
blue or gray of the clarity.
December 1.
She is making a difference between how the land seems
and how the land looks.
If the land is a place and the place sites
your content or the place orients your sense
of value, then what is seeming about the space that
also seems inside your body?
Snow closes the space to you and the dark arrives earlier.
You have no space to look out to in the dusk.
And so it seems that you are having no words.
You see woodpeckers on the snowy dirt.
It is mild and snowy.
It is morning.
So you think their quick movements are
something you can speak about.
The red throats of the males, the volume of their down,
the carnations of snow in the pine trees.
It seems a principal to be describing these things
or what you are describing as if it were just to describe
the beautiful place.
How does seeming correlate to the fineness of your seeing?
Or decrease with your seeing?
What is the virtue of the description of a salmon
tamarack frond in the snow, the blue wave appearing?
Meaning, the storm is passing.
The movement of time in snow through space.
2.
Here is a star in the cold night that is alternating red, blue.
It is two stars revolving around each other, cold and hot.
I see it among the clear still stars of the configurations.
The dark shapes of juniper at the height of my shoulders,
streaks of leftover snow showing in starlight near their bases.
A woman tells me there is no value
because right and wrong puts you into the past where stars are
from now.
She said, if you want inspiration,
just stop my thought about my mother, for example.
And then wait for the next thought.
That inspiration comes in between,
but it does not come in words.
Here is the content at night.
She says, the content is subtle beauty.
If she would say what the content of happiness
would be in the sky or in shadowy streaks.
How she could tell the relation of the starry sky
or the shadowy streaks with life.
By what criteria she could relate the stars and the snow
to her.
By what criteria she could determine
a content in their apprehension or the apprehension
of subtle beauty.
When the starry sky has nothing to do with life,
that its content would be an occurrence
that could be otherwise.
The 3rd.
Now I want my memory to wash over.
And so my memory picks aspen leaves scattered
across the ground by the river.
The sun glints on the silvery upturned ones.
They are in this place, but it is not
something in this place that would
be generating the direction of the observation.
There would be a layer of glinting papery leaves
all ahead of you in low sun.
And this layer would be forgetting.
Red wands of bushes reaching into the air
from the sandy river bed.
Reaching into the blue of the sky
are forgetting that goes into the blue, freeing your mind
of forgetting or by forgetting.
The way you can free the sky with a branch reaching into it
or hold the sky with this branch.
4.
An impression in cold twilight of fading apricot
pastel behind the gray cottonwoods,
like mist at the edge of a red riverbed.
The trees created cold for me.
Is that representing the cold or symbolizing the cold waning
day?
The trees in the distance across the dry
riverbed where I walk, the rocks like a film passing.
The character of a rock that was some molten flow onto sandstone
of black and red and gray, like the cold space
behind the cottonwoods.
But in matter recreates or represents
a content of passionate love.
5.
Running the length of the top of the ridge
is a hogback, dark and dense ore from the center of the Earth.
The sun falls fast behind the mountain,
approaching its southern point.
The Wave shows neon pink at the edge now.
The iron boulders are patterned with chartreuse lichen.
The rocky mountains are still glowing pink,
though we are in shade.
The Jemez Mountains, cerulean blue that gives off light,
are the lips of a great volcano.
Arroyos in the near plain intimate articulations of walls
of flesh and sand colors.
If she were thinking about a place, then listing the place
might be an analysis.
An analysis of the progression south
of the moon, which should yield a meaning of what
she is seeing to her.
Listing and listing the line of the hogback by coordinates,
the infinitely complicated line from point to point.
If she were thinking about the content
of a view and its relation to life,
this would have to be a synthesis.
The content of a view relates to life synthetically.
The relation to life is perceived
through the perceptual dimension of what
she is thinking she is seeing.
Misty bare cottonwoods bunch around the town.
Out here is desert.
6.
If she were thinking about the relation between the content
of a view and the view's relation to life in a new way,
she cannot think.
The view is the content and the life is the time still.
The view is your movement through millions
of parallel lines of falling snow,
seemingly disconnected traces of paths
through space across the time you are looking or moving
through in the night.
Like light of clouds at sunset, she can't tell their distance
from her.
The value of the content is equivalent to a mood.
The content or story of the view is repeatable and depends
on your orientation or mood.
The changing of an orientation marks time.
The depth of the content of a view
depends on the degree to which your body can respond
to your perception of the view.
So the content is abstract.
The value of content of a view depends
on the degree of your response, but it is not the response.
The emotion of your response dictates
the value as the passion.
Even driving through snow for a long time in the night,
the view lengthens across the time through which
you are traveling.
A tunnel view of your response of moving through it
through the night.
7.
The Wave turns gray.
It is the darkest month of the year.
The landmark turns in on itself.
Your daughter sees the moon for the first time, a half moon.
The luminosity of the grasses is of a yellow gray
of the winter light.
This year's new growth of the area
glows yellow on the gray spindles.
The story of a daughter and the moon, for example,
appears submerged by your intention
or in a multiplicity of detail or in smoothness of detail.
The story seems submerged, but it emerges
like cottonwoods in the arroyo.
All their massed yellow leaves lined the turning arroyos,
half concealed like fringe.
All summer, green indication of underground water in a drought.
The ground is bare.
The half trees betray wealth.
The gray turned inside foliage with sky in it,
tonight catches the moon with their way of the way eyes
catch it.
8.
If I look at the land, it is in shadow.
But I can clearly see the sun through brushy juniper
that is making the shadow.
It looks like a shadow, but it must not be a deep shadow.
The mountains on the other side of the hogback
were rows of the close ones and lavender just beyond.
The Wave, which has turned further into itself,
is growing complicated, aging in the dark.
Land seems bunched up at its base like loose old skin.
You have a content of a view and you have a content of life.
And these relate to the body.
Or does this seem so because of my daughter's birth?
Snow clouds low to distant mountains,
thick and dark and gray in the morning,
are a gesture of a hand flung upward, wispy pink
streamers in the evening.
Was that my body?
The dark husks of yucca pods after sunset
of a color of the density of the body as the origin of words.
9.
Dozens of varieties of dry grasses,
she's empty but still catching the light.
Stalks seem more luminous yellow than electric, a color that
retains its luminosity when placed next
to the skin of your hand.
While colors of electric light and sunset synthetic colors
lose their beauty.
So you would think beauty pertains to light.
But beauty is an idea or a feeling that associates
from light to the mind.
10.
Now the impetus of a place can diminish
or the impetus in the time of your place in it.
She sees the gold halo left by the sun,
although she missed the sun.
She feels the tiredness that would be like her extension
into the illusion of the fourth dimension or third dimension.
And this gold is a frame darker and colder.
The colors are darker of branches and snow.
Why is the feeling changing?
You feel that the place is still oriented or located correctly
in the mathematics of the stars and lines of force
of the world.
But you are not oriented.
Your feeling makes you out of place.
Your feeling makes the place darken and turn in on you,
which it does not do.
It still extends a line into space for the rabbit
to race escaping.
It still sends a line of a glance across the horizon
into infinity or vertically levitates a glance
to it at night."
12, I don't like any more, so this is the last one.
"13.
She thought she could say that.
Then she walked up the hill and waited for the moon
to rise after sunset.
The sky darkened, stars showed.
Venus is bright with reflected light.
When I see some light near the horizon, a breath of light,
I realized there's a low cloud and the beginning of the moon
cannot be discerned.
Then it is a cold mist light in the cloud.
And I'm trying to see where the cloud ends
and the sky will yield a sharp outline of the moon.
And I'm trying to tell how far the moon has
risen behind the cloud already.
And I think I can make out a huge circle of light there.
It lights up a shape of a cloud along the near hills,
along the road.
There is a triangle of foggy light
along the ground to my left.
When the moon clears, it is small and compact and metallic.
He says, you can tell it is one day pass full because it
is so heavy, dragging itself.
I wait for the gap between the low edge
of the moon and the dark cloud.
And then I can go.
This is the moonrise I anticipate.
I know its entrance on the horizon because it is a place.
I have something of a sense of moonrise in future time,
and it is a kind of elongation or collapse or dispersal
of a phase, night and day, where a line of another person
thinking could accompany you physically."