I think I'll now move, and then I'll
come back to read a final poem from that collection
to work that I've been writing over the last couple of years
that's more or less centered in West Texas,
or the Rio Grande Valley, which is the space of composition,
but also the space of the imagination.
It's entitled "Carbonate of Copper,"
and the title comes from that marvelous little book
by the art historian Michael Baxandall
on 15th century Italian painting, in which he talks
about the difference between carbonate of copper,
which was a lesser blue than aquamarine
for painters at the time.
And I like this idea of the materiality
of carbonate of copper.
And I'm also thinking of the poet Allen Grossman
and his idea of the beloved companion.
And in a sense, the book was begun
during the COVID pandemic.
But one can think of the beloved companion
as this kind of widening circle, as Grossman points out,
a family of affiliative kin of neighbors,
of the known and unknown, the human and the nonhuman.
And for him, the poem is a kind of unforgetting,
and this is, to me, the drive behind some of the work.
And I've been influenced as well as the participants
in the class yesterday known by the work of Pauline Oliveros
and the idea of listening--
to listening as a kind of full embodied practice
that turns one into that other person that evaporates.
And also to Jane Bennett's idea of vibrant matter
when she says that, that which is nonhuman or material
also has a kind of agency, that it's active
and has an earthy, not quite human capaciousness.
It's that impersonal life that surrounds us and infuses
us that has that kind of painful nagging feeling
that something is being forgotten or left out.
"Carbonate of Copper."
"In the hours, I was left to the elements.
Sorely colorless labor evolving facts of a day.
Days now deficient in matters of fact.
So many attachments of the tribe to the stupefying circle,
it burns a new image of the Earth,
disabling the view from nowhere.
Am I unsheltered and so out of time as to wonder,
does my face defy its aim on end?
Am I the architect of this very small thing
I derive or refuse from seven descendants?
Does a landscape here obtain as when
there was food, the field, abundant, sun, summer,
Green River Valley, chestnut, little bomb, border, milestone?
Came the builders of a sudden identical twins
at the sugar mill.
It was a window overlooking the carbonate of copper
on shapes, predictive in the wireless ether."