Born out of 2008 road trip to Santa Fe, NM, this poem came to be. For a performance later that year at Artopia with the talented Sheri Brown, I adapted the poetry onto a long scroll. I’m currently revisiting its themes of fiber and water for an upcoming performance/installation: Mater Matrix Mother and Medium at Seattle Center for the Next 50 directed by Mandy Greer, likely to take place on May 5 + 6. Stay tuned!
Acres and Acres
I.
It was only in a dream that I was here. I wrote a postcard to illustrate the differences of the river (a warm spring) and the fire (what heated the spring).
The yellow grass rolled like a woman in a dress constantly unfolding a flamenco fan on the long horizon
A red bird with negative plumage flew by like self-portrait in a mirror, all the sounds backwards.
II.
I had to travel to Nevada to see you. I wish I had stayed longer now in the warm springs, that I had taken more than two stones, that I had taken more time and more than three photos.
Little by little, I want to give you something. Little by little it will lead up to this. The gift I had really intended won’t make it because postage has gone up again & they didn’t know that at the post office in Tonopah. I was missing 3 cents but didn’t realize until I got to Flagstaff and there’s no mercy where they don’t know you, is there?
You’ll have to take these words instead, like a frog takes water. Through the skin.
III.
I had to travel in a different breath, the window was closed again. When it opened a piano was sneaking through like two mice talking risky business on a rope. We stared at each other in motionless love.
I remember we were in the middle of a cornfield. Us and the farmer’s laundry. It was hopeless, there were no telephones. The sun was a sweetly smooshed banana, the sky was wavy like water. The ground was covered with acres of paint brush flowers, orange as petrified erasers.
We spread maps around us like an angelic halo we might need to protect us from the ghost towns. The water taps were dry and we saw a mama bear and her cubs. Yosemite folded against Mineral Springs, Mono Lake against Mariposa.
We stood in a line that we drew wishing this as protection for ourselves. It was all a matter of trivia so that we wouldn’t leave the other behind where the boards get abandoned and the car doors shot at.
IV.
We drove across the pink and vermillion cliffs, the ochre canyon lands, the longest painted map of Route 66, the thinnest point of air pressure in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and stepped gingerly through the creakiest of crags.
Then we drove to Nevada for the truth, wide open.
One grain of the plains is equal to something more unusual than itself, a ladder or a chute, a place of rescue, a house that only exists in memory.
The true cost of gas was confirmed to me by the cows.
V.
Bovines on the ridge – he stops to take photos of the expanse – sage, dirt, sulpher, chicken wire, dusk, sky, stones, rust, dented awnings, clouds, wind, dust.
VI.
The sky wasn’t dismal, it was serrated like a scissors that cuts zig-zag into calico.
The landscape print repeated until one tree at the crossroads unzipped its leaves into the warm spring.
The rusted stones and corroded beer pop tops, the white mineral froth and the milky cracked cell phone lay in desolation’s landfill.
This is where we pitched our tent and then built a house with no walls, made love to the sound of wild steer eating grass.
VII.
On the side of the road: needles & pins, textiles & tools. A girl weaving sumac into a black & red bowl. This is where the holy people live, where mirrors enter portals and the road turns inside out, stictching reveals my childhood bedroom. I sit down on the bed and apples begin to spill out from underneath. They all go rolling so one side of the room as if pulled by a magnet. One apple on top of the pile is tied by a soft blue ribbon. I get up & pull it which begins to hopelessly unravel the whole room and there is the highway again with its edge marked with stones. The girl selling her bowl showing the way we are all born: out of the center coil, the tight knot of earth.
VIII.
In ancient Greece, the Three Fates spun, measured and cut the tread of life, determining mortals’ destiny with a spindle and a blade. Later we talk of the fabric of life and the thread of a narrative or story.
Coming down highway 157 we saw a dark mounhtain in the west, south of Sacramento. It was the day of Angel’s funeral, so we planted her a sweet alyssum. Then we past a sign that said Angel Road and I put down the poems of Harvey Goldner to consult a local map. It said we were in the middle of nowhere and that that mountain over there was called Harvey Mountain. Good ‘ol Harvey had said “Everyone wants to go to heaven but no one wants to die,” so I cut this story from the cloth.
Scissors come from fingers. Spindles come from sticks. Before weaving, before wheels, was the needle. Da Vinci was interested in spinning, using wheels to make it faster. Throughout history, everything has been made to be faster.
Since the Industrial Revolution many waves of craft have covered the world. Purl, stitch. Purl, stitch. Show me the hand of the maker. Show me the hand of the farmer. Show the textile raw, show it – steel, gold, carbon. Show it – coarse wool, silk worms. Show a girl feeding hay to the llama. Twist it to spin. Place the spindle on the wheel. Hand-crank and snuff a thimble to the thumb.
Thimbles are made from ivory, thimbles are made from wood, thimbles carved and colored slowly led to dolls cross-pollinating in style from Puru to Navajo, and Poland to Mexico, Mississippi all the way to New Guinea… dolls made of clay and cloth, real hair and horse hair, many looking alike, as if long-lost sisters.
Since needles & pins were a great cost to woman, she protects her tools, cautously covers her cusions. If I loved you, I would make you a pin cusion. If you loved me, you would buy me a needlecase, or a tape measure coiled inside a painted wooden egg.
IX.
For dinner we ate four rutabagas over mustard lemonade spice tapenade with a prickly pear margarita (stiff) and perfectly paired with a hearty artichoke salad’s red beet ink mixed with shredded carrots all covered in a garlic olive oil sauce of crimini pureed as sexy as a saxophone solo after Tom Wait’s gravel voice from clock/radio speakers and three whiskey shots and a little hotel romp in the Jane Russell Room at the Hotel Monte Vista all leopard print and so dark during the day even gotta turn on the lampshade red wine velvet and the fan’s been on since the last tenant and the water’s either hot or scalding and the trains don’t stop counting 45 cars every 20 minutes from the nightstand mirror before stepping down into the Cloudroom for a little espresso so dark and ethereal like the Continental Divide’s made-up switchback line in the mountains just over that ridgeline, but not so far as to start flowing out the wrong way, the other way that is not yourself that is to say that you’re not wandering & flowing so long that you’ve forgotten all you’ve seen & who you are or the long stretch of land that’s been covered under your skirt since you passed the Tiwa baking clay in kivas, and Navajo & Hopi out on the mesa weaving baskets with all their symbols that make all the difference between their time and your time and how things like water don’t know the difference of time, except for maybe the water in your body which is constantly chemicals & constantly a solution & constantly a mixture of skin & blubber & meat surrounding that special neon tube you’ve got inside which is to say your soul all wrapped up in a mini-vending machine of your own that only you have the supply to and only you know to bump to the left with your knee for the free-bee distribution every now and then which reminds you to take a vacation every so often, to relax and go out beyond where the line is.
