I've never
felt a sadder spring, then a spring in Philadelphia. Or at least that's the way I feel today on this unexpectedly slowly
falling day here in Houston.
Let's
meditate on snow falling, try to remember the bits of light sloughing out of
the empty expanse of sky and grayness.
The gray of the snowstorm.
But wait.
snow is not sky falling, pollo
poco, it's sky
sloughing bits
of wissahickon mica
schist 'til
heft is on us,
high brought
low, fly weight, exfoliation.
And
suddenly I can remember the snow, the weigh it sloughs, its heavy weightlessness, its heft. These are
careful words, weighty Middle-English words (not that I looked them up to
check, they just feel that way, have that feel of long f sounds). I also have not googled
"wissahickon mica" but just from spending time with this book (g-point almanac: passyunk lost by Kevin Varrone) I have a feeling that
this is a particular kind of geological sediment. And I am guessing this geological sediment is around
Philadelphia. And I have not
googled "passyunk" either, but I'm guessing it is a street in the
city of brotherly love. Brotherly.
This
book feels like a series of wintry experiments, a continuation of a quest to keep on writing through the
dismal grays of the long, barren snowfalling. Many of the pieces are titled what look like dates,
beginning with "1.7" and getting progressively more February, then
more March. The first poems in
January are in a section called "a fortnight for st. distaff." It is made of slippery square boxes of
text, justified mostly and yet sometimes a line pushes out the side and
sometimes a line doesn't reach the justified line. As if the lines themselves were resisting the Word
justification strategies, pushing or pulling their way out of the text block:
I was
reading here with the light filtering through the blinds and through the one
missing blind and thinking about the sentences in the photo, how light falls,
quickly, headlong. Light's tail.
What
does light do? What does light
make? What are words about light
or the world able to do, to make?
I realized that if I were a strophe
or an imp or an ooze--a great stroke
on canvas--
I could not make a building
make a building great
make anything.
Repeat. Make. Repeat. Make. What is
the difference between poetry and architecture? Painting and architecture? What is a building?
Do we make anything lasting in the process of our art? Does a building last longer?
History
pervades and invades:
passyunk avenue was a footpath
& several
(from the anglo-french several,
"existing apart").
I've
been thinking and writing around rivers, through rivers, through others words
about rivers for some time now.
Often it feels rather hopeless or at least strange and repetitive (like
crossing rivers). Boring or lost. And then sometimes when I feel most at
a loss about why I've been obsessed with these rivers and I can't take it
anymore, I pick up a book, like I picked up this one (recommended and lent by a friend). And inevitably, I stumble
on a line like this one that makes me realize it's okay to be lost among the
rivers:
perhaps the city has risen
not from ashes
but from the foam of its rivers,
Yes, we
can write whole books about so little. Yes, a day can be full with so
little. Or so little full of
itself. When I finished this book,
one line kept re-occuring in my mind.
Spring has never seemed so sad as a spring in Philadelphia. And in the background of this sentence,
Jack London's old dictum that "The coldest winter I ever knew was a summer
in San Francisco." I haven't
googled anything yet, so if I fractured the quotes, forgive me. I wanted to rely on memory though,
because this book lingers in memory, its deceitfulness, its perpetual habit of
getting lost. It lingers on winter days after the equinox, the days ever-so-slowly lengthening.
The end
(and the whole) is winsome and full of ennui (a word that comes up numerous
times). There are tiny
poem-letters to "e," a lost lover or loved one of some kind. The end:
dear e, the traces
don't
stay
as they pass (save as
a million flecks of mica
in the sky).
day keeps putting on
its cloak and darkness
keeps putting things away