"It is important to remain faithful to something--that is, to finish the same thing over and over."

~Fanny Howe~

Folded pin, Ojai, California: A tree with two trunks, one of which appears to grow out of the ground, arc back down to the ground and grow back in.

Surely it’s some kind of illusion, but nonetheless it functions as a landmark, meeting place, and canopy over a civic-minded amphitheatre. And has.

Marked by initials and a massive twisting split in the arched trunk.

You can build around a space, but not build the space itself.

~Fanny Howe~

On the first day of summer the weaver takes her loom down from the ceiling in a very early dawn and sets up for the deepest red fabric. It is a color one might call bull's blood, or airplane.

This is to be the largest acreage she has made, and on the longest day of the year. When it's finished she will cut lengthy swags to hang on either side of a yawning fireplace and the sun will suspend a ribbon of light from the lip of the view. A pot of tea steams lightly on the table; she's wakeful and charged.

An hour into the weaving, she moves like a nesting bird back and forth, a chugging and delicate rhythm, hands and syncopated legs. The only variation is to glance at odd intervals out the window, the shadows crawling and getting crisper along the fence.

In his makeshift studio, meanwhile, the painter runs a pencil over what he has rendered as a summer funeral on a scrap of paper: the cheerful preacher, the heap of sod and the knot of black where mourners are singing a hymn. If this were part of the mural, he wonders, who would the weaver assume was meant to have died?

The painter and the weaver have their antecedents.

The weaver tells the painter about broadcast landmarks: the neon letters affixed to the bluff, lighting C-L-A-R-K one at a time and then CLARK-CLARK-CLARK repeatedly, and also a ketchup bottle that empties, empties, then suddenly fills, also in neon. This is a weirdly old-fashioned dream of the future. Electricity paints a city in her imagining.

The painter tells the weaver about the sentence bird. This is a songster, possibly blue, that delivers its call with such regularity--like neon blinking on and off--that the clanging phrase seems to exist inside his ears rather than in trees--smaller caves, not bigger ones--and he hears it even at night when the bird is surely quiet. The call, unlike the casual inquiry of the red-eyed vireo or the magnificent fanfare of the cardinal, is an actual sentence: a complete, descending thought with a touch of offhand arrogance about it. The bird utters it all day long every 10 to 15 seconds.

These antecedents--one tall and red, one an echo chamber of whistled sound--help the painter and the weaver understand each other sometimes.

A snake in the house can be a way of talking to someone.

Or it can be spotted by the cat, then taken outside where it moves through the grass, over a mound of dirt, matter-of-factly through the garden fence made of netting, and among the beets, where it simply disappears.

Sacred and Profane:

"Hunter painted her pictorial map of Melrose as a tondo."

1) a circular painting
2) a sculptured medallion

The home inside the circle is a warm, cotton landmark.



"She collapses past and present, catching viewers in a time warp of a way of life that, although dead in much of the South, still persisted on Cane River."

A pin has pores, lamps or arms.



Or it is regularly placed or cut off.



Horizontal members make a cave.



Or a canyon is shelter with no roof.