"Members of Byrd's party and their counterparts from North Carolina drove a cedar post into the ground near the Atlantic Ocean, just north of Currituck Inlet, on the morning of 7 March 1728 and began the survey."

~Stephen Ausband, Byrd's Line

An upright pin with bark and a scent marks one end of a horizontal pin with zero width. It is unknown whether the western end of the line was similarly staked.

"I had come to the house, in a cave of trees,
Facing a sheer sky."

~Louise Bogan, "Medusa"

The trees are the house, and without the house.

The house is a pin inside a cave.

The sky is a cliff or a curtain.

On Sunday morning, before IGA opened, a cloud made the brown mountain purple.

Apparently, in the season of holding fire in the organs of the house, the accepted method of obtaining mistletoe is to shoot it out of the oak trees where it grows.


Thus the mistletoe is a portable pin and the bullet, on its mission, is a spinning vehicle.

The weaver sees the moon in various ways. It is now deep into the night phase, and meanwhile the moon is a svelte blade that pops overhead between long sessions in round, amber-colored places. She sews or stirs inside. Then she sees the moon as one point of a triangle, the other two planets, the moon’s unlit side a faint stencil, before she ducks back in the door. Or it lays itself all over a scalloped cloud. Or it fronts an opening in trees made by a straight road rising and falling: they drive up toward the moon.

Little did we know it would descend.



We came home to the flat slab instead of the folded roof and half-black walls we had known. The only verticality left is the chimney, as in the days of old.

In this way a pin is transformed, drivers shove the brakes, the talk about a landmark changes from practical and past-referencing ("just past the burned down house") to speculative and future-based ("what will it be?"). They were giving away a smoke-coated mirror laid on the lawn by the road.

In town, there had been a very tall crane in the process of building a hotel--not quite as tall as the crane--when a money problem stopped the work. The crane had been a pin for months, its pivots attracting eyes as the building's skeleton rose on itself, becoming a larger and larger pin on its way to being one of the city's permanent and notable ones. But now it is a standing lack. And it's said the crane may not be dismantled because it is not profitable to do so. The two of them together--unsettling crane, unfinished hotel--are now a single pin, a not unhappy marriage, both of them all function and empty and obvious.

Everything is raining. A flurry of descent, or sideways movement, and dropoffs making for revelation. The painter is glad to see that the basic forms are bare again, and the weaver thinks that the suddenly longer sightlines are exactly like an alarm going off. It's somehow a relief, the stripping; solid objects made transparent.

The weaver and painter are illuminated by orange leaves. They are confronted and toppled by orange sun on orange trees. There are corridors and edifices made of orange, subversive backgrounds of orange trees, orange lamps and finials. All the light is a slow red bulb coming on and on and on; the days are orange-sweet, set off like topaz. Orange trees surround and rise like buildings; they begin laying an elliptical carpet of themselves at their ankles, at the weaver's ankles, at the painter's eyes.

"There's a certain ambivalence in my character that I like about myself. It's part of what makes me a good writer, you know? It's not necessarily useful in a presidential campaign."

~Barack Obama

"...the dialectical notion of truth-as-unconcealing--which we might symbolize with a hyphen-like vinculum, here representing the horizon line..."

~Xavier Klasi, 1976

Vinculum: 1) a unifying bond; 2) a straight horizontal mark placed over two or more members of a compound mathematical expression and equivalent to parentheses or brackets about them. See also VETCH.

Vetch: Any of a genus (Vicia) of herbaceous twining leguminous plants including valuable fodder and soil-building plants.

Both terms are akin to Latin vincire, to bind.

Horizon and soil: Both are truthful as in slowly revealing. Also, they show off to each other.

A road is a horizon that revolves like a belt on an engine. Roadcuts are planted in a white and purple mane of crown vetch.

The painter has been sitting here and there. He sat gingerly in the grass under trees that dropped small, randy fruit, which sour the air by melting into a paste the color of raw sugar. He sat on a broad slope of rock on whose left edge a foot-wide braid of water runs; he looked at the sky through the break in foliage made by the smooth chest of stone. He sat on a stool among sharp-edged stems and saplings, looking at one square foot of complicated ground and listening to crows and faroff engines.

He knows himself to be incapable of spending a hundred years on a painting.

Correspondences:

Pumpkin to moon to light bulb.

Bird's breast to nest.

Just as the body of the bird both shapes and inhabits the nest, the house is human-sized.

If it is too small it may put the mind in a shell.

But if it is too large, it oddly replaces the body, because while its half-acre rooms and aggressive facade might inflate its occupant's standing, they also render his body a pathetic miniature when set against their proportions.

A horse enters a stone barn through the man-door. Wild turkeys, half a dozen, heave themselves into the tops of tall trees.

Do the humans fit the hill?

"Ivar led Alexandra and Emil to his little cave house. He had but one room, neatly plastered and whitewashed, and there was a wooden floor. There was a kitchen stove, a table covered with oilcloth, two chairs, a clock, a calendar, a few books on the window-shelf; nothing more. But the place was as clean as a cupboard.

"'But where do you sleep, Ivar?' Emil asked, looking about.

"Ivar unslung a hammock from a hook on the wall; in it was rolled a buffalo robe. 'There, my son. A hammock is a good bed, and in winter I wrap up in this skin. Where I go to work, the beds are not half so easy as this.'

"By this time Emil had lost all his timidity. He thought a cave a very superior kind of house. There was something pleasantly unusual about it and about Ivar. 'Do the birds know you will be kind to them, Ivar? Is that why so many come?' he asked.

"Ivar sat down on the floor and tucked his feet under him. 'See, little brother, they have come from a long way, and they are very tired. From up there where they are flying, our country looks dark and flat. They must have water to drink and to bathe in before they can go on with their journey. They look this way and that, and far below them they see something shining, like a piece of glass set in the dark earth. That is my pond. They come to it and are not disturbed. Maybe I sprinkle a little corn. They tell the other birds, and next year more come this way. They have their roads up there, as we have down here.'"

~Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

Speaking of axes:

“A truly subterranean space is not only closed but also has an element of verticality...If we go or imagine going underground, we enter an environment where organic nature is largely absent, but we also retrace a journey that is one of the most enduring and powerful cultural traditions of humankind: a metaphorical journey of discovery through descent below the surface. Even in places that lack caves, such as the Kalahari Desert and the flat landscapes of Siberia, the preliterate inhabitants assumed a vertical cosmos. Nature was assumed to be as deep as it was high. Narratives about journeys to the world below were inherently sacred...

The more I worked with American subterranean stories, the more I realized that they did not fill the same cultural role as in the Old World....American writers typically develop the theme of a technological environment on a horizontal plane...The conditions are entirely different in Europe, where it is much harder to find open land: the vertical journey makes more sense when the horizontal possibilities are much more limited than in the New World.”

~Rosalind Williams, interviewed by Sina Najafi in Cabinet #30

We might have known that every mine is a pin. But this would make every road a tower.

Unhinged pin:

"In the Museum of Modern Art catalogue accompanying the 2001 exhibition 'Mies in Berlin,' a hand-tinted print of one of these photographs is accompanied by a caption that states, 'Glass Skyscraper Project—No intended site known.' Current research strongly suggests that Mies did not intend for the photographs to be understood as portraying a particular place; the model was intended as a proposal for a new theory of light in architecture. Yet Mies took the unusual step of placing his design in what appears to be a real site, replete both with history and evocations of nature. The caption that the catalogue gives the project seems to imply that it is for no place. This impression is paradoxical. The thirty-story building clearly stands in a somewhere, and yet that somewhere is considered a nowhere."

~Josiah McElheney

This house melted before we ever saw it. Two pins flanked its entrance, left and right.



In the fire one pin was badly injured. Another remains healthy. Before the event they were a pair to mark a home. Now, unequal, they have separated their functions--one to suffer, perhaps die sooner, in its skeletal look and eventual absence declaring the disaster.



The other to mark its own safety from fire, and to hint at a time before a mistake.



Long after the smoke had spread too thin to smell, someone came to tend another pin. They pulled down the old one and threw it under the unburned tree. They put a new one in the spot and planted mums. These have died.

The weaver sits cross-legged in bed, tracking the in-and-out phasing of crickets along the fabric of the dark. There may be a warp and weft to the lines they make: one is nearly continuous like a creek, another sings steadily but with slow openings and closings inside the sound, another punctuates the song, like a clock’s second hand, with a raspy double note. All these are perpendicular to each other; what they weave comes in the window as a sheet.

She is not thinking of it now, but the painter will not be able to paint this sheet into his mural. Today he was beginning to sketch outbuildings lightly onto the wall. A small barn they both know well, opening out on the downslope side, with some vehicle lurking in its dust and half-dark.

What she is thinking is, what season will it be in the mural?

The woodstove in the center of a one-room schoolhouse is a spinning pin. When you are small it is behind you. Years pass, you erase your slate a thousand times, you are sitting next to the stove, more trudging and reciting, and finally you are the biggest sitting in the back row looking at the whole school: woodstove, rows of bent heads, maps on the walls between windows, and the teacher at the front. She is another pin. The schoolhouse is a book. The wind pushes on the walls.

“These riflemen..drive a nail into a tree with a ball without bending it...”
~Thomas Nichols, 1864

Thereafter the nail is quite a horizontal pin, piercing a vertical one. As with a fence the tree may swallow the marker eventually, so if the rifleman wanted to come back as to a monument, remembering, he would have to make careful note of the tree. But then maybe he would have shot nails into trees once a week or more and forgotten all of them. Pins all over the district, rusting.

“In loading, a greased patch of cloth or buckskin was laid on the end of the muzzle, the bullet was centered on it, and both were rammed down the bore together. This cleaned the barrel, and the bullet, when shot, engaged the rifling, and spun.”

The painter is working on some trees in the upper left of the mural. Their shadows mass in layers. He isn’t sure yet where to place the buildings but he knows these trees have some relation to each other, and can make a weight together that will indicate something about the arrangement of the barn, the smokehouse, the springhouse, the sheds, the coops, the summer kitchen, the house.

Of course the river will be in one corner of the foreground, making a single convex curve as though rearing up from another lower place. In literal terms that place would be the underfloor of the dining room where the painter is painting. Otherwise it is an atmosphere of water which will give part of its weight and spray and run to a small province of flat blue-green paint on the bottom right of the wall.

The trees hold their newest fingers out lightly, pointing in many directions.

A thicket of metaphor from G. Bachelard, each stem nosing through the others:

“And the next day when I come back, walking more softly than the day before, I see eight pink-white eggs in the bottom of the nest. But how small they are! How small these thicket eggs are!”

“Here the entire tree, for the bird, is the vestibule of the nest...Thoreau tells of a green woodpecker that took an entire tree for its home.”

He quotes Jules Michelet: “On the inside, the instrument that prescribes a circular form for the nest is nothing else but the body of the bird.” And then comments: “The female, like a living tower, hollows out the house.”

Impeccable example of a spinning pin. It is

A) historical. Thomas Jefferson soaked here in 98 degree mineral springs, and thus do we;

B) historical again. The building is built in the nineteenth century, well after Thomas, well before now. It sags and rots and changes direction. It is so charmingly ramshackle as to be induce worry—not that it will fall down but that it will be tragically misunderstood and violently torn down, which would seriously compromise its pinship;

C) circular;

D) encouraging of contemplation, as bubbles trail up;

E) a physical enactment of spinning, as one floats on a “noodle” (not historically accurate) and thus glides serenely around the center pole, watching sky and rafters spin languidly, at a pace one might describe as “annual.”

The logo, Civilian Conservation Corps, is a stake planted in a park. It marks a spot where people labored for our recreation.



It is a pin connecting anyone now standing in this cabin, with its linoleum updates, to the Depression and an intention of showing work in the woods. Time collapses a little when one honors one’s grandfather. Mine labored in the CCC in Idaho, but the logo is a cross-country pin connecting his work to that of the Virginia-assigned men who built this little cave.



Uphill, a pin becomes a different pin: Sign on tree, nearly messageless.



At the top of the mountain, or alternatively, at the end of Mountain Top Trail, a very large pin (the mountain) is made more clearly pinlike by the addition of a smaller, more human-scaled pin. Now we know where we are. If erosion is changing the shape of the mountain and thus the location of the actual summit, we are unaware of it.

The weaver helps the painter remove the rear shocks from his car.

This involves crouching inside the hatchback, hoping her long skirts won't brush the oil on the seats and the carpet, holding vice grips on the top of a bolt while he strains to turn a wrench on the nut.

She breathes and remembers, earlier in the day, listening to the call of a pileated woodpecker--itself the aural equivalent of the pecking action, a repeated stab inside a small swath of trees near the creek. The bird's ike-ike-ike-ike went on steadily for a minute or more, with variations climbing and falling slightly through pitch and tempo, here a bit more frantic and there more lax. But, also, it seemed the bird was turning or flying around within an area roughly car-sized. The direction of its voice kept changing, and the reverberations shifted and made different colors and rooms among the woods. After a while the bird left its spot and struck off downslope, still calling, and the house its sound had been making turned into a road, swift and directional, falling away behind itself.

The painter gets the nut free, panting.

Two landmarks on the Appalachian Trail:

First, after you climb down a cleft you step through the water and, probably, every single through-hiker puts her feet on the roots of this one maple tree on the way to Maine or Georgia. The trail is a tight fit here and cooler air rolls down the V of which the streambed is the bottom. Maybe the white blaze is matched by an invisible spot where every left or right hand is laid on the bark as the person passes.



Second, a pin spins down toward the soil and makes itself, at one time anonymous, into a landmark, bleeding clay from the feet. Hiking out of the South, especially, you remark on it.

The painter is looking at photographs.

One shows a farm family under an enormous tree, arranged like chess pieces on thick-legged chairs, one boy sitting on a barrel, tall sons in suspenders behind their parents, a baby’s white dress flowing over her feet and continuing extravagantly down her mother’s lap.

One shows Woody Guthrie.

One shows a collection of buffalo nickels and coins from South America.

One shows a man in a lab coat looking into a telescope.

One shows a ranch house in a small yard with a bare patch of dirt in front of the concrete stoop.

The painter looks out the window to the tops of sycamore trees, which are releasing light steam, two days’ rain meeting near-level sun.

Found from Minnesota to Quebec and Mississippi, Eastern Screech Owl is a monument to human naming and noticing, marking various groups' languages, dialects, metaphors and observations with its collection of names. According to Allan W. Eckert, The Owls of North America, it is called:

demon owl, dusk owl, ghost owl ("so expertly avoiding collision with intertwined branches that it appears to go through them"), gray owl, Le Petit-Duc de l'Est, Little Dukelet, little-eared owl, little horned owl, little owl, mottled owl, mouse owl ("prey it most favors"), quavering owl, red owl, scops owl, scritch owl, shivering owl (for its call, its effect on the superstitious, and "because young nestling Screech Owls are subject to severe attacks of shivering"), spirit owl, squinch owl, trilling owl, whistling owl.


In one way, these names pin to the creature and become monuments to human times and places, as though a regional culture could fly through the woods and return to a nest.

In another way, the variation itself is a complicated pin that marks the owl's own changeability. It can be a range of colors and shapes (when apprehensive, "the owl can elongate its perched body until it has stretched upward nearly half again its normal perched height"), and its call is really a dialect in itself, full of versions and individuation.

Years pass, but dusk is still "the time of day when it is most often seen"--the very time when a sighting is possible, but difficult.

The weaver is folding laundry.

Deep into the basket, not off the top, she reaches and grabs one shirt or one napkin, plucks its corners strategically, whips it precisely, moves her pinching grip to its centerline, lets it fall against itself, rotates and repeats, then piles it with a gentle thump on a stack of likes.

It's raining for the first time in seven weeks.

She stands in a small, ground-level room, one shoulder to the single window, her gaze landing halfway between the small towers of cloth on the table and the whitewashed wall.

The weaver thinks of the tulips, months past blooming but still able to take the water where they lie, wide-eyed, in the ground. She thinks of the rain falling right into the puzzle of the dry creekbed. And it must be washing dust off such small things, broken bricks, iron pegs, wood shavings left in the grass where someone was making a bucket.

Though it is late August, this pin is behaving like October. Therefore, it is time-traveling. It is making itself into a monument for an approaching season. In its sphere, one feels clear and chilly. The history of fall--all falls layered--is pierced by this pin.

Inside the house, we paint paths on the floor by walking.

In a half sleep, the painter is recalling other works:

They seem good-natured and their opposite curtains make half a sphere.



Their dog is as long-nosed as they are.



Large and careful decorations.



"Couple in a Garden"



Man and child



Two titled "Cutout Profile of a Young Lady"



They are married. About 1835



Both in a forward style. They are unacquainted



Carpet, accoutrements, inscriptions. "Aged 22." "Aged 18."



"Intimate Conversation"

Dear Christopher John,

The night you were born we stood in the laundromat folding our clothes together, and the door was open to the heat and the bright dinnertime light. And we drove over blue ridges, one mountain lighter behind the closer one, and past the gardens and horses and creeks and into the valley, over the bridge, up to the farm and there was a rainbow leaping off dark sky.

And we drove home with our sunflowers, peppers, potatoes, coxcomb, and put them all away and looked at our plants and our cat. And there was a pile of dirty dishes which I started to do. And your Uncle John weighed our tomatoes, one batch seven pounds, the other batch eight pounds, and you weighed six pounds. And when the dishes were clean we boiled water and cut Xs in the tomatoes and boiled them briefly and took off their skins. And the skins made an angular mound in a blue bowl, their flesh was firm and sometimes it broke and cicada sounds were rising and falling outside the back door.

And three big bowls of boiled tomatoes slowly became six clear jars of skinned tomatoes, as we listened to music and slipped off the skins and toasted you with champagne and got tomato pulp on the outside of the glasses, and seeds and juice puddled on the counter and the big canning kettle started to heat and murmur on the stove. And we waved a moth away from the fragrant tomatoes. And we sealed the jars and put them in the boiling kettle and covered it up to wait.

And it was late and black and heat came off the steaming stove and in from the deep summer night, cicadas, owls, crickets, silent raccoons nosing through the weeds. And this day, July 30, became a pin on the calendar because you were born, in Florida, to Sarah and Chris. And we made a dinner with sweet corn and meat and yellow summer squash, and ate at our table under our ceiling. And the wait was over and we pulled the jars of tomatoes out with oven mitts. And I wish for you a night like this.

And the next day the moonflower bloomed.

The painter, nursing a blockage of imagery, is passing between the springhouse and his room, and notices--on the bottom rail of a board fence--a suspended skink. It's a four-inch-long lizard caught, by its tail, in a dense hanging cobweb.

It isn't moving; the web is tightened like a sleeve around the narrow point of its tail, its legs are relaxed and its eyes are open. It's inches away from the ground, the fence, or any other solid thing. It and the web are a tiny construction which turns freely like a breeze-blown pendulum.

From its tail to its head, the five lines on its black back turn electric periwinkle blue to the yellow of a daffodil, an even and surprising spectrum. A pulse beats on both sides of its neck.

The painter touches the web and the skink leaps into a small fury of motion, further trapping itself, but he frees it and watches it zip under a brick, where it freezes.

He continues on toward his room, cold spring water in his hair, his brush full of red.

Basic instructions:

There are two horizontal axes and only one vertical axis.

This has to do with the earth.

The towhee's call, interpreted by Americans as DRINK-YOUR-TEA, could in fact be followed as a command. This drinking of tea would be an instance of self-imposed obligation.

What are the painter and the weaver doing?
Are they walking through tougher, choked paths, being brushed with sticky plant oils?
Are they talking about making hay?
Is she typing?
Is he mixing a blue?

Painting is somewhere between sweeping and building.
Cleaning is erosion.
Weaving is three-dimensional.

They watch the sun set by way of a hill to the east—a pink and gilded reflection—then surreptitiously slice a tomato, and part of its seedy flesh falls on the painter’s worn, string-laced shoe.

Extremely fancy pin.


A name no longer applies, but still implies.


Nostalgia for a local form (highway markers) causes an imitation (street markers) that, itself, is missed and longed for.


A landmark is amputated.


The symmetrical form follows one around.

What about the pin in sign language, when a person signs “I” by pointing a finger at her own body?

As time passes and the person grows and changes location, the pin travels. But it is remarkably stable in relation to what it signifies. The finger is always with the person. The sign communicates more directly than the English word “I.”

It is a fixed point, even as the object of its communication—the person who points and is pointed to—undergoes rolling, bewildering changes.

A pin, noted daily from a particular location, may be found to divide on approach.















This could complicate its function.

Points: Mt. Whitney is the highest point in the continental United States. But from Lone Pine, California, it looks shorter than Lone Pine Peak because it is further west. You learn to identify it by the two fingers of rock to the left of the peak. It and the imposter are like the twin trees on our land.

The highest point is in some sense a point, infinitely small (though its altitude is measurable) but supported by acres, volumes, infinitudes of Sierra granite rising from the earth. A cone of granite holding up the noted point.


A guy we met at the hotel mentioned "touching the summit." Then we discovered that we are all from the Pittsburgh area. Then he said Anawanna, the name of a Boy Scout Camp 3,000 miles away in Amity, Pennsylvania, the village where I grew up and my mother still lives.

Then I talked about a gas well in Amity that I saw for the first time last week, between Anawanna and my mother's house, which has invaded with noise and bright lights and earthcuts and erosion a hillside on a formerly beautiful farm in a formerly lovely valley. The farm was previously owned by the obstetrician who delivered me in 1977. The pump grinds up and down all day and all night, extracting money via a narrow vertical shaft, privileging one lucrative lubricated point over all the surrounding land, all the homes, all the neighbors' living senses.

A frame makes a pin out of something that spreads.

A page pins a hat.

Louis Banks, in Studs Terkel's Hard Times:

"When I was hoboin' through the Dakotas and Montana, down there by General Custer's Last Stand, Little Big Horn, I wrote my name down, yes, sir. For the memories, just for the note, so it will always be there.



Yes, sir."

The childhood home of George Washington has been identified by archaeologists in part through the presence of straight pins.

A home is a spinning pin which becomes a monument which glues the nation to the present. And for anyone, childhood is the vase that holds the stems. It is to be rebuilt with 18th-century materials and tools. Oyster shells were also clues. George's mother lived there most of her life.

The weaver trods over goldenrod and grass to the cherry tree, which decorates itself with fetching groups of fruits, each harboring a stone. She intends to fill a quart basket and eyes a low series of branches, easy with their jewels. She will trot them back to the studio and divert the painter with their shades of coral and crimson.

He is beginning now to map out scenes on a spare piece of wood, practicing for the first strokes on the wall of the dining room itself. Standing to look, he squints, tries to enter his own lines, taps his fingers on his thigh.

The women in the harvest scene are bent, dragging sacks of cotton at greater angles than their own backs and the heavy white bags like fish leaning right in one row and left in the next row, so much fuller and brighter than the women that the eye sees the cotton as the bodies and loses the people themselves. A horse pulls a wagon with three wheels askew, full of cotton, uphill.

Each figure is alone—the woman with the camera, the man riding sidesaddle, the woman large as trees, each of four workers, each row of corn. The washerwomen and laundry line grope in an ocean of green, suit, bloomers, two sheets, a baby’s garment…

He looks out the window, where the weaver is visible under the mimosa trees, holding a basket of red and pulling in deeply the trees’ ecstatic smell.

One task is spotting tomato worms. Unlike sweeping, this job looks like inactivity. You stand or squat near the plants and wait for your brain to register the thumb-sized worms among the stems and leaves.

The problem is that their camouflage is flawless. They are the exact shade of green and their diagonal stripes mimic perfectly the veins on a curled leaf’s underside. It’s impossible to digitally reproduce the sensation of a worm emerging motionlessly into your vision—your comprehension, actually.

The act of pulling them off the stem and crushing them (a dark, wet compost of green tomato-plant pulp squirts out) is a more recognizable task, maintenance or cleansing, but it cannot be performed until this little shape-meditation is complete. After all, the worm is a predator. Sometimes its false eye-spots, pretending to gaze back, are what give it away.