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.