Spinning Pins

2009-02-04T08:54:00.002-05:00

The weaver is dressing and sees a pileated woodpecker draped in cheerful light on a near tree. She freezes and watches for a while, then thinks of binoculars, tries pulling her clothes on without breaking her gaze toward the bird's big head with its red-orange blaze and stark white-on-black stripes, gives up, finishes dressing, and goes to fetch the binoculars. When she gets back to the window the woodpecker has moved to a different tree and is moving up and down a vertical trunk. She hears it call and then sees a different woodpecker, smaller, very close to the pileated. Through the binocs she notes its red head and zebra back, then fetches a field guide and finds it under red-bellied woodpecker. The pileated is gone. But a third woodpecker, smaller still, is flicking among higher branches of the same tree, and she spends some time focusing and chasing it with her lenses and looking it up in the field guide (downy or hairy) before seeing the pileated again, looming in the background of the magnified image, feeding in a tree behind the one she's focused on, its broad back and axlike movements partially visible, like an enormous gliding ship glimpsed between buildings at the end of a street.

2009-01-29T09:01:00.001-05:00

"There were several Wests [in the 1830s]: the old Southwest of Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay; the old Northwest we call the Midwest; the Northwest of Lewis and Clark; what we call the Deep South, also once a "West"; and the Far or Spanish West, beyond the borders of the United States as it then was."

~William Seale

2009-01-26T15:34:00.001-05:00

“As it happens, the etymology of the word true takes us back to the old English word for ‘tree’: a truth, to the Anglo-Saxons, was nothing more than a deeply rooted idea.”

~Michael Pollan

2009-01-08T09:07:00.000-05:00

The painter has become at least as interested in the question of time as he is in the question of space. He has painted bare trees behind the house only to foliate them later. He has put in a certain worker three different times—carrying water, scything grass, chopping wood—and with each new version has erased the last: How can the same man be doing three tasks at once? Yet the man does do all these things in one day.

If the mural’s to be an image of only one possible moment, there are many tasks that will go undepicted, and many animals that will be hidden. Light from the windows in the dining room moves over the unfinished mural, from grey to gold to white and back again.

2009-01-08T09:02:00.003-05:00

A time capsule is a buried pin that may accept water despite its maker's efforts. It is a pin designed to end its usefulness on a specific date in the future, when it will be dug up and opened. Until this date, several generations of people must be trusted to hold the knowledge of the pin's location and open date. Therefore this knowledge, if written down, becomes a pin in itself, sitting in a drawer, sometimes talked about.

Or perhaps the capsule is marked with a plate or a vertical stake—either one, of course, also a pin. The capsule’s contents, then the capsule itself, then the knowledge of it, fixed or mobile—these form a layered succession of pins, through which humans attempt to contemplate the passage of time on a scale that exceeds their own lifetimes. In other words, the contemplation itself must be performed by a succession of humans in communication with each other, none of whom can perform it alone but each of whom contributes a part to its whole. The contemplation itself is a pin. The newspaper inside the capsule is too wet to read.

2009-01-08T09:00:00.002-05:00

The painter is visiting nearby and is told about a snowy owl spotting the week before. It was sitting on a fencepost and then flew across the road in front of the person's car, on enormous not-entirely-white wings, far out of its species' normal range. Newspaper accounts and official mobilizations followed.

The painter leaves and drives down the same road on which the owl was seen. It is a rainy, anticipatory day. After the bridge he sees it--on a fencepost, not entirely white, leaning forward--but it never takes off. It is plastic. It watches him pass with alarmed plastic eyes.

2009-01-08T08:54:00.007-05:00

The dissolution of the house.

"Though doors and windows may be cut to make a house, the essence of the house is the emptiness within it."
~Lao Tzu

When it burns, it is as though a lid comes off a jar full of fireflies.

There is talk of taking down an important oak tree in order to replace the house that burned. But the tree itself encloses a houselike emptiness. To use its site for a house would be nothing comes from nothing.

2009-01-08T08:52:00.001-05:00

Vibrating pins:

7. Some people consider personal wireless service facilities to be unsightly. Is there some way to make these structures blend in with their surroundings?

Answer: Antennas for personal wireless services can sometimes be mounted on existing structures such as building roof tops, church steeples, street lights, traffic lights, or electric utility substations, where they are relatively unobtrusive. Painting antenna structures to blend in with the existing structures is also an effective camouflage. Camouflaging of antennas is also used to accommodate highly specialized land use concerns. For example, a personal wireless service provider seeking to locate a transmitter site in a historic district may consider camouflaging the antenna in such structures as clock towers or artificial trees. Such camouflaging is, however, expensive and time consuming and most service providers are reluctant to routinely use the camouflage option.

~FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, Fact Sheet #2, September 17, 1996: National Wireless Facilities Siting Policies

2008-12-17T08:33:00.002-05:00

"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.

2008-12-09T13:04:00.003-05:00

"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.

2008-12-02T14:26:00.003-05:00

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.

2008-12-02T14:25:00.000-05:00

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.

2008-11-13T08:47:00.003-05:00

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.

2008-11-13T08:40:00.002-05:00

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.

2008-11-13T08:39:00.001-05:00

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.

2008-11-07T14:59:00.001-05:00

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.

2008-11-06T10:28:00.001-05:00

"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

2008-10-14T08:28:00.004-04:00

"...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.

2008-10-14T08:26:00.003-04:00

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.

2008-10-14T08:22:00.002-04:00

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?

2008-10-13T13:45:00.002-04:00

"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!

2008-10-09T11:10:00.002-04:00

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.

2008-10-08T08:48:00.002-04:00

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

2008-10-08T08:41:00.004-04:00

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.

2008-10-01T14:04:00.001-04:00

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?

2008-09-30T08:40:00.000-04:00

2008-09-24T08:51:00.002-04:00

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.

2008-09-23T08:40:00.002-04:00

“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.”

2008-09-17T08:15:00.000-04:00

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.

2008-09-11T12:20:00.001-04:00

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.”

2008-09-10T09:06:00.006-04:00

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.”

2008-09-09T08:30:00.004-04:00

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.

2008-09-05T09:40:00.001-04:00

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.

2008-09-03T13:54:00.003-04:00

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.

2008-09-02T16:36:00.001-04:00

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.

2008-08-27T08:38:00.005-04:00

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.

2008-08-27T08:34:00.002-04:00

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.

2008-08-25T14:51:00.003-04:00

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.

2008-08-20T08:50:00.001-04:00

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

2008-08-13T09:14:00.013-04:00

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"

2008-08-05T15:35:00.001-04:00

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.

2008-08-04T16:01:00.003-04:00

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.

2008-07-31T16:24:00.001-04:00

Basic instructions:

There are two horizontal axes and only one vertical axis.

This has to do with the earth.

2008-07-29T15:16:00.003-04:00

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.

2008-07-28T15:35:00.001-04:00

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.

2008-07-23T14:51:00.009-04:00

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.

2008-07-22T15:53:00.001-04:00

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.

2008-07-21T12:52:00.009-04:00

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

This could complicate its function.

2008-07-17T08:38:00.003-04:00

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.

2008-07-17T08:31:00.001-04:00

A frame makes a pin out of something that spreads.

2008-07-14T15:41:00.004-04:00

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."

2008-07-03T08:21:00.003-04:00

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.

2008-07-02T16:12:00.002-04:00

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.

2008-07-01T12:00:00.003-04:00

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.

2008-06-30T14:40:00.002-04:00

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

~Fanny Howe~

2008-06-25T16:05:00.001-04:00

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.

2008-06-24T08:26:00.001-04:00

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

~Fanny Howe~

2008-06-19T08:34:00.002-04:00

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?

2008-06-12T09:06:00.004-04:00

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.

2008-06-09T13:09:00.003-04:00

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.

2008-06-05T16:19:00.004-04:00

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."

2008-06-03T14:40:00.004-04:00

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.

2008-05-30T10:18:00.001-04:00

The painter and the weaver are unmoored, whales in a blank ocean of sod, pins themselves to hawks or the sun. They cast shadows that ripple on the seedheads, towers broadcasting dark on what will broadcast new grasses.

The painter traces a long arc as he walks, impatiently, a little in front of the weaver. She watches the hair riffle on the back of his head. She thinks of writing to her sister. A truck's loud brakes, half a mile away, carry over the windbreaks. The sun washes through her view, too abundant to see.

They come to the edge of the field and enter the province of a spreading oak with near-horizontal branches seven feet off the ground. It is a world. The ground underneath is cool and springy. From here the field is a field, not a sea, and the place to lie down is obvious.

2008-05-28T12:32:00.005-04:00

It was months ago that the two trees announced their eerie similarity, one an echo of the other's shape.

Now that the leaves are out, it becomes clear that despite the correspondence, they are of different species.

2008-05-27T14:58:00.001-04:00

Synonym for small:

thin as six o'clock.

2008-05-20T08:37:00.004-04:00

The weaver sweeps and makes coffee. This is filling a pot with hot water for coffee, cold water for cleaning, hot water for coffee, cold water for cleaning. She walks to the cupboard for grounds, to the sink for water, cupboard, sink.

The painter brings a white cup and sets it on the step. He lays his tools and brushes along the table. The master wants a mural that will gather up the acres and roll them out again along the wall, ponds and horses suspended in summer or late spring, but the painter can only see tiny things--the nub of a peony shattered by a heavy rain, four brown eggs on a brown plate carried by the weaver's younger sister. He stares for a long time, without seeing. Ash on the stones.

When the weaver is standing at the sink, he presses his hand into the small of her back and says, "Come walk with me."

She puts down the coffeepot and they look left and right as they leave, guilty.

Into the barnyard and through it quickly, not walking close, until they come into the woodlot and toward each other, bending to examine a grotesque rubbery fungus like some alien brimmed hat attached to a stump, then out again into the lonely hayfield, usually private seedheads swaying, a bunting at the edge, brilliant blue on a low branch.

2008-05-20T08:20:00.002-04:00

Housewarming:

We met a neighbor for the first time and he greeted us with the news that he once killed a copperhead on our kitchen table.

Is his voice the one I've heard yelling many times, or once, laughing loudly?

2008-05-19T15:26:00.002-04:00

Suddenly last fall I noticed a break in the privet hedge fronting the road. Old stone steps down the bank. An overgrown entrance, directly in line with our house's front door.

Once remarked upon, this opening in a formerly solid wall seemed to enlarge.

2008-05-15T08:46:00.003-04:00

"From Baton Rouge to New Orleans, the great sugar-plantations border both sides of the river all the way, and stretch their league-wide levels back to the dim forest walls of bearded cypress in the rear. Shores lonely no longer. Plenty of dwellings all the way, on both banks—standing so close together, for long distances,

that the broad river lying between the two becomes a sort of spacious street. A most homelike and happy-looking region.

And now and then you see a pillared and porticoed great manor-house, embowered in trees."

~Mark Twain~

2008-05-13T16:39:00.002-04:00

We've been meaning to start marking where the sun rises.

2008-05-12T15:44:00.002-04:00

The chimney pins the house down and opens it to the weather. It is a vertical edifice, slim or hipped, reaching through the center of the house or anchoring an edge. Through the chimney the house exhales, a workaday dragon. The chimney is a pin in the time of a particular house, foundation-steady while wingchairs and family members come and go around it. And it pins all houses--the original center of the hearth, commonly punching through human roofs. (Needs for food and heat link years and far-flung persons; gods or clocks have occupied the mantle.)

In its belly are the ministrations of housekeeping--fire-tending and, therefore, stews bubbling and water boiling and hands rubbing--and up through its lengthy, unseen interior chamber travel the atmospherics of the human domestic, byproducts of common necessity, daily emissions. Our breakfasts and teas and lye: their usefulness fills the volume of our houses but their ethereal and material signatures rise, billow, escape and rejoin the clear air above. So chimneys link the solid bottom of the hearth--the flat, sooty site of utility and economy--with what is most inaccessible and intangible--the sky.

And when the painter and the weaver, after the first hailstorm of summer, lean to listen at the opening of the fireplace, they hear the white noise of the flooded creek, muted but distinctive, carried down the chimney to their ears.

2008-05-08T14:16:00.007-04:00

According to an expert, the chimney may be used to let someone know you are coming, before you round the bend:

"And the boat is rather a handsome sight, too. She is long and sharp and trim and pretty; she has two tall, fancy-topped chimneys, with a gilded device of some kind swung between them; a fanciful pilot-house, all glass and "gingerbread," perched on top of the "texas" deck behind them; the paddle-boxes are gorgeous with a picture or with gilded rays above the boat's name; the boiler-deck, the hurricane-deck, and the texas deck are fenced and ornamented with clean white railings; there is a flag gallantly flying from the jack-staff; the furnace doors are open and the fires glaring bravely; the upper decks are black with passengers; the captain stands by the big bell, calm, imposing, the envy of all;

great volumes of the blackest smoke are rolling and tumbling out of the chimneys--a husbanded grandeur created with a bit of pitch-pine just before arriving at a town;

the crew are arriving on the forecastle; the broad stage is run far out over the port bow, and an envied deck-hand stands picturesquely on the end of it with a coil of rope in his hand; the pent steam is screaming through the gauge-cocks; the captain lifts his hand, a bell rings, the wheels stop; then they turn back, churning the water to foam, and the steamer is at rest."

2008-05-08T09:09:00.004-04:00

Shade is reliable, like fire.

2008-05-06T16:01:00.002-04:00

"These brooms are able to stand freely on their cut ends:"

She is always sweeping, bricks and chestnut.

Given charge over all the family's floors, she wears through three brooms a year, up and down all the breezy hallways, back and forth across parlors and bedrooms, and three times a day in front of the doors, where friends of the master come in for beer and goose or the gardener minces in red-clay boots, yelling for water. And when she comes back into the fold of her own little chamber at night, she has an old broom in the corner that she methodically draws along the flagstones before she puts on her nightgown.

A peculiar sidestep, left foot joined by right--in this way she walks every inch of house, outbuildings, summer kitchen.

The artist watches her, imitates the little dance in front of his window, begins to think of his mural, stirs a cup of wine by agitating it in his hand.

2008-05-06T13:54:00.003-04:00

Trees are spinning pins.

But they are landmarks that move all year.

2008-05-01T13:29:00.004-04:00

We enter, live and suffer within, ignorant of pounded nails and layered images within each day-dark wall and corner. oh! is it not rich in comfort & hope to you

--Your stranger-friend,
the house.

2008-04-29T13:58:00.004-04:00

A carved flower isn't identifiable.

2008-04-29T08:38:00.003-04:00

Homesteading:

He and the weaver look at a spider together, webless.

Some of them live in cones.

She whispers against his neck, "its back."

Two red spots.

It folds itself into a vertical pocket of space along the heavy white window frame.

An injured limb.

She puts herself away inside his chest.

2008-04-22T16:41:00.003-04:00

Name-sayers:

The phoebe says phoebe and the cardinal says cheer.

2008-04-17T08:43:00.005-04:00

A chimney's smoke may mimic a column.

This is correct.

The fire in the hearth is the spot marked by smoke.

The fire is a spinning pin.

Then the smoke lies down in the valley.

2008-04-16T10:36:00.003-04:00

The master asks for portraits first. Every family member. Five children, the lady, the master himself. They are to be surrounded by possessions, suggestive gems and pursuits, and also swathed in the land, leaves arranged around their bodies.

He is not well taught. She can see that in his shoulders. The quality of his work seesaws one week to the next. He puts the grey of dawn around the mouth of the third son, renders books too narrow to read, paints the master's eyes like steelhead swimming upstream. Curtains are blocks of red strokes.

For the second child, Martha, he puts his easel next to the window and drapes a black string crookedly around her neck and breast. Her generous creamy sash, her careful lace--he takes her unformed gaze and paints it knowing, only a little fear in it, mostly just looking back and holding a peach. He keeps her face intact but makes her arms too long.

The weaver, his lover, stands behind him in a corner speaking into a tiny recorder in her palm. Or she scratches captions to his canvas onto a scrap of paper. Her father had been a homesteader here, four miles upriver where the valley is tighter.

Paint cracks in waves toward Martha's body.

2008-04-10T12:25:00.009-04:00

"The family

was as much fixed to the soil as the altar itself."
--Yi-Fu Tuan

2008-04-08T16:07:00.005-04:00

The SITE:

“Jefferson Davis State Historic Site is a memorial to the famous Kentuckian born on this site on June 3, 1808. Ironically, just eight months later, and not more than 100 miles away, another great Kentucky statesman was born, Abraham Lincoln.”

[Ambrose Burnside (with newspaper) and Matthew Brady under a long, tall tree]

[Officers and ladies in Virginia under long, tall columns]

[The last reception of a long, tall man]

The SIGHT:

The Civil War is not the tallest obelisk in the world.

“(Because its cross section is octagonal and doesn't have a pyramidal top, the San Jacinto Monument could be considered a column instead of an obelisk.)”

“The 9-pointed star is 35 feet tall, weighs 220 tons, and can be seen as a star from any direction in the site because of its unique configuration. The star took 20 working days to build and each stone used in the star was 12x12 inches in size, 3 inches thick, and had to be cut to fit. Not a single piece of the star was level and plumb.”

The CITE:

“It is hypothesized by New York University Egyptologist Patricia Blackwell Gary and Astronomy senior editor Richard Talcott that the shapes of the ancient Egyptian pyramid and Obelisk were derived from natural phenomena associated with the sun (the sun-god Ra being the Egyptians' greatest deity).[2] The pyramid and Obelisk would have been inspired by previously overlooked astronomical phenomena connected with sunrise and sunset: the zodiacal light and Sun pillars, respectively.”

The urge to mark the spot with something long and tall comes from space. But sun pillars now come from streetlights too. So where does space come from? And where is the spot?

2008-04-07T12:21:00.003-04:00

"...appear to be the thickness of stone...":

An itinerant artist arrives on foot at a wealthy home, itself patterned after Greek temples. It is meant to be seen from the river. It is built in either 1820-1860 or the late 20th century; in either case it is a mimic.

The artist is hired to paint a mural in the dining room. It will depict a version of life at this very estate: a half-finished fence, an animal with its head down, people bent to their work. Clouds as solid as cliffs. One man approaches on a horse. This is an idea of rootedness and agrarian forcefulness. It is a florid explanation of a disappeared past. The clan wants its trees to bloom during supper.

Meanwhile, the artist himself is never at home.

He becomes involved with a house servant who weaves cloth for the family. Or, she mows the lawn. She lives inland in her mind, walking back and forth.

2008-04-07T12:07:00.007-04:00

2D imitations:

A brown thrasher may sing over 1,100 song types—mimicked from other birds—within thick shrubs.

This morning I heard it do robin and cardinal.

Then, a tangent: A meow-like call, and the birdlike chirps of the aroused housecat in the windowsill, got me thinking it was another type of mimic—a catbird.

I had to look to confirm its identity.

2008-04-03T16:26:00.001-04:00

Stake and begs:

"Concentrating on the panoramas of his homeland, [Worthington Whittredge] steadfastly pursued a career as a landscapist. Carrying his gun, stool, umbrella, and paint box, he set out on often dangerous expeditions to discover new subjects. He worked particularly hard on a canvas called Crossing the Ford, struggling especially with one obsessive detail: a stand of cottonwood trees. Determined to get it right, he consulted guides of the region, traveled back to Colorado, and, between Denver and Loveland Pass, searched for several months for a particular group of trees he had discovered four years earlier along the banks of the Cache la Poudre River. He finally found the place and worked desperately, producing sketch after sketch, to render an accurate version of this singular group of trees. Only after two years' effort could he assure himself that he had succeeded."