Friday, September 21, 2007

THE LIGHTNING FIELD DIARY

1

Approaching Quemado
Rossellini’s crow
roosts atop
his pile of coal

(or better)

A Marxist crow
on the side
of the road

on a pile of coal
on the way
to Quemado


2

Empty theatre but
for table
tennis table, immaculate
floors, strewn
corpses filling the sills


3

Locals’ Disdain


4

Desert hail hailing
us forward

(rain arriving
coffee percolating)

K sulks as the storm
blows us off


5

Desert sea
birds peep

A cottontail
poses and darts

assails the camera
leaving green

eggs in its wake


6

A tremor in the poles
communicating some geologic
code to us

Some voices are so
deep they leave
us feeling like a moment

of breeze


7

The queen drags
her bulbous
globe through
the needle’s shadow


8

According to Walter De Maria: Isolation is the subject of land art.

According to Jakob von Uexküll: The umwelt is a composite of biological foundations that lie at the very epicenter of the study of both communication and signification in the human [and non-human] animal.


9

What is the song appropriate to the umwelt of the human? It is important to think without thinking. To play without the expectation of joy. If possible, to joy flush against the uncounted strum. There are no words in the ground. Tourism is sin. There is, finally, an ethical response to standing.


10

Her red hair
has grown
more red
unhurried

A black beetle
nudging
the toe
of her boot


11

According to Walter De Maria: The invisible is real.

According to Elizabeth Grosz: Living beings are vibratory: vibration is their mode of differentiation, the way they enhance and enjoy both the macroscopic cosmic and the microscopic atomic forces of the earth itself.


12

All of the sudden
All of the sudden

Or, perhaps
it is the landscape that
plays us


13

A heron risks being
impaled on
the dusky points


14

There is something
to be found here
that was lost
elsewhere I think alarming
butterflies from
the brush clomping
stupidly


15

Military plane overhead
mud seeming
to bubble in the near
distance

Closer it alters
to tens
upon thousands of tiny
fingernail-size horseshoe

crab-like creatures
scrambling carapace
over carapace
in some frenzied birth

It occurs
to me that lightning
may have relit
the beginnings

of a new universe inside
the old one


16

Sunset tops
the blackened tips
like pencils

newly hewn
K never
more beautiful

bottle in hand
smile light
hare ducking

beneath the porch
earth wet with shadow
poles disappearing


17

Or, perhaps, the
visible isn’t


18

K and I fight
over sheets dream
strangely wake
in the predawn crush
giddy with stillness


19

Prairie dog jaw

half of it

like an ornament

for the stones


20

The triops have gone
under, no
more bubbles, one

awake on
its cape of
a back


21

Still there
is “danger in

veering
toward
abolition”


22

The shadow
of my crotch
now fifty
feet away


23

Landscape Acupuncture


24

Beetles wrestling
with the remains
of a fig

A dim figure plotted
amid the poles

himself a compound
of: receipts
percepts, excerpts

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