Ghost Ranch
Creosote, Lavender, Echinacea
Mt. Pedernal in the distance
Chama River
Gorgeous trees changed yellow
Red earth
Amazing rock formations
Prairies & mountains
Uploaded on December 30, 2006 by Daulphin
Uploaded on October 25, 2005 by mr_wahlee
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South porch of Ghost Ranch house
Allen Ginsberg sits with O’Keeffe
Shows her how he meditates,
Crossed legs, straightened back, closed eyes—
Breathe slowly, other instructions
But she doesn’t mimic him.
He asked, “What do you believe?”
She outstretched her arm
Palm up in a semi-circle
In front of her toward Pedernal,
“It’s hard to say.”
Fragrant sage, clouds, blue sky
Rocks she had gathered
Beauty around her everywhere.
Later driving Allen & Peter to Santa Fe.
Allen said he was surprised
How little money she had.
I explained simple surroundings did not
Show her wealth. No need.
—C.S. Merrill
I imagine myself writing a letter to a favourite novelist.
I would tell him how I, too, enjoy the feeling of slipping into my writing as if slipping into a pool of water.
Leaving everything, the taunts of naysayers, the nagging of loved ones and circumambulating thoughts--
everything, behind.
I imagine dwelling with him for a short while beneath some overarching boughs.
We are barefooted, our feet enveloped in the softness of the damp green moss, our eyes almost shut as if in prayer, listening to the wind moving through the trees, the crickets in the grass.
"We have art,"
Nietzsche says,
"so that
we shall not be
destroyed by the truth."
I.
When my sister and I travelled to Barcelona during Christmastime one year we stayed at a youth hostel in the Barrio Gotic, a popular neighborhood for tourists. We found this hostel intriguing because the maitre d' was in the habit of smoking hash in the kitchen with the inhabitants at the end of the day. He offered us some hash and we proceeded to tell him the story of All About My Mother, which we had just seen in the theatre. Why we trusted him, I'm not sure. Probably because he seemed set in his ways. His evening smoke was a permanent fixture in his daily schedule. And the upside of the communal smoking experience was that we met some very nice Indian-Canadians who told us where to find the good shopping area and played Hearts with us in the room that we shared.
My old friend Matt once wrote a poem about Barcelona
in which just the world Barcelona was set apart, so
Barcelona
as if you could actually taste the word and roll it around in your mouth, slowly.
III.
Megan is in love with tiles. She especially loves
tiles from Barcelona, but also from southern Spain. She once took a course at the university on the geometry of tile design
and spent a semester designing her own tiles. At first I didn't understand her fascination with the tiles whose patterns sometimes made my eyes swim. Now I understand it's her love of color and pattern and originality. In America, things tend to be generic and mass produced, but these tiles are painstakingly made, handmade, objects d'art, unique, singular, irreplaceable as friends.
I remember my father teaching my sister and I Latin. He usually taught us tidbits of Latin while he was driving, probably because he wanted to keep his mind occupied, but also because he wanted us to become intelligent adults. He taught us how to say "Semper ubi sub ubi." This was easy to learn because of the repetition of the ubis; because of its assonance. Once we learned the phrase he told us what it meant, but first he made us guess. Thank you very much? Where is the bathroom? Can I have a glass of water? No, no. "Semper ubi sub ubi" means always wear underwear.
I once had a piano teacher. She was an absolute romantic and preferred the musical equivalent of Shelley and Keats to the musical equivalent of the Beats. Even though I respected her knowledge, I wanted to reproach her for being so bourgeois. I wanted to shock her. She needed another flavor to add to her palette. So I painted her a reproduction of one of Louise Bourgeois' spider sculptures--a huge black thing like a Rorschach blot on a white page... To say that she didn't like it would be an understatement. She hated it. And I was tickled pink.
Taste of peppermint tea; a sampling of conversation from the ether:
“2 pawns a piece… is good enough…” and we continue.
He refused to sell his property until the day he remembered the day he spent with her at the tree, the one day he can’t believe he had ever forgotten.
“Knight there, knight there…”
and still the shining unbeatable sun.
The toys were kept for the neighborhood children, who took far better care of them than he ever did.
[Something out-of-the-ordinary-here]
[Something we've never seen before]
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