"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?