A DEFT BOTTLING OF A FERMENTING LANGUAGE

First of all, I still love mornings and breakfast. Maybe I love mornings best of all the times of day. But then, I also love dusk and the hour or so before it, particularly on Thursdays, when the week's work is done. But mornings!

Second of all, my photographer self has been on the ebb-tide lately. But I've been looking closely at those images that form in my brain when reading. Reading reading reading. And so I offer some words. Why has it taken me so long to read some William Carlos Williams? I mean, seriously.

From Kora in Hell

I.1.
Fools have big wombs. For the rest?--here is penny-royal if one knows to use it. But time is only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there'll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms, in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.

VII.1
It is still warm enough to slip from the weeds into the lake's edge, your clothes blushing in the grass and three small boys grinning behind the derelict hearth's side. But summer is up among the huckleberries near the path's end and snakes' eggs lie curling in the sun on the lonely summit...

XXIV.2
Pathology, literally speaking is a flower garden. Syphilis covers the body with salmon-red petals. The study of medicine is an inverted sort of horticulture...

II.3
Huzza then, this is the dance of the blue moss bank! Huzza then, this is the mazurka of the hollow log! Huzza then, this is the dance of rain in the cold trees.

The woman that lived in my apartment before me is an artist. When TS and I looked at the place the walls were painted a lovely shade of green, and there were a few of these strange little paper doll paintings tacked up in the dining room, where she had a small table on which to work (I am sitting in just that spot right now, where I also have a table on which to work and eat). The little paintings were whimsical and strange. And so, later, after I'd been living here for a couple of months and had seen her around town a couple of times, I asked her when and where she might be showing her work. And the answer was January, at a gallery a few blocks away. I was not disappointed...a strange lexicon of figures in constellations with teeth and bare birch trees. Sometimes their bones are exposed. There are flames and wax and thread.

The image above is part of a larger piece called The Horse Latitudes, a phrase and a concept I haven't thought of in years, and why not? I have been thinking and writing of teeth, tomboys, and yes, the Horse Latitudes. And these are connected. Those threads are yet to be woven. But here is a strand in which you will see only slightly discernable evidence of any of the above topics:

The bubbles are gone from the ginger ale. The saltines soggy. There are crumbs in the bedclothes. In the sickroom the velvet curtains are drawn. He dreams of burning horses, of masks and sparks and faces in the flames. Throw it overboard. All of it--the straw effigy, the empty suitcase, the peacoat, the dictionary. Watch them waterlog and go nowhere. Let a little blood, if only to color the water.

What happens to the horse thrown overboard? Do they shoot it first, or just push it to the edge and watch it swim--the clumsy hooves, the straining neck. Does it float like a loaf of bread? The seagulls surely picking clean the ribs. The fish nibbling a trailing intestine. The curved ribs like a whale on the ocean floor. The long spine. The teeth so strangely human.

He kicks at the blankets and the dog, sleeping halfway under the bed, bites and licks his dangling hand. The room smells of seaweed and sweat and peat smoke. What he would do for a glass of whisky. A small glass and a little sunlight. The dance and gleam and the clink and the ice cube melting on his hot tongue.