Whatever dark river or lightning strike or bad choice or accident made and undid her, whether or not she was the author of her own tale, whether it was a story terrifying, melancholy, dull, or full of delight, danger, abuse, and of losses few or innumerable, the woman who had crawled out of Orphan Mountain and, unbeknownst, into Trey Handel’s house did not belong to those forces now. She was secreted in another kind of story, high as a tower, where through the roof of a glass room she watched the clock of the world pass over her—tart, persimmon yellow equinoctial sun, unbuttoned blouses of cloud, cerulean byways, star clots, the constellations in their leg-irons, the moon in its guises, mysterious silks of the galaxies—and she moved, sometimes without clothing, through urns of light and passages of darkness, and slept in a bed with rails like a baby or a crone and fed a scratch of cracker meal to birds who visited at a wide sill of the one leaded window she could crank open.
Below her the woods burned, a piazza and fountain, and beyond that, leaf-flames girdling a black pond scoured by regal swaths of the geese who fell into their own reflections, then lifted off again with strange, concussive, mournful bellows, departing in Vs that reflected those they left in their wake when they swam across the dark water. Sometimes the man with the gray ponytail, reddish in the sun, and black glasses walked among them, shouldering an axe.
Up here, safe, her wounds slowly healed in warm, rank baths she drew and emerged from, silver hair untangling in lengthening rivulets down her shoulders, back. She felt like someone very old who has outlived everyone she might have harmed or who might have harmed or loved her. Anyone she might have loved. When she saw herself in a window, a mirror—dark eyes, filmy hair, loose belly, starred sloop of breasts—she opened her mouth in a cloud of mist against the glass as though to practice making a word. Or name. Occasionally a mouse scampered, quick, along the moldings. A clubhouse smell, fecal pellets in the drawers among beeswax candle stubs. On cold nights she wore the robe, burned with matches from a drawer old chair rails, papers, boxes, in the sooty maw of a fireplace. She ate all the old food leftover in the cupboards, thought about the man below, and whether he would ever enter this room, or if she would ever leave it.
from The Refrigeration Incarnation Series [Em’s Notebook], c.. 2000
Icebox as heart. (who says “icebox” anymore?))
Idea for series: show up with Polaroid camera and ask random people if I can photograph the unedited contents of their refrigerators.
Premonition: joy lurks inside me.
Starting with my own: Missionary position condo fridge, rectangular box, scoured inside with cleanser & inhuman light. Aura of emptiness. Metal grill shelving. A feeling of transience—a beach house vibe. Clean upon exit or pay the security deposit. Paul’s is the top shelf, which he stocks himself when he’s in town: fake-O yogurt (pudding cups). Hot dogs. bananas. (why all the phallic foods? & . . . why refrigerate bananas?) Diet drinks. My shelf: bagged lettuce. Tofu from a local commune wrapped in wax paper. Three bottles of white German wine. In a bin: net bag of onions, baggie of tarragon. Much re-used cardboard carton half-full of eggs from Johanna’s hens. Can’t see the half-full part because the carton is closed. Jug of water. Freezer: a sad geode of frost.
Visitors to Wm Blake’s Lambeth cottage describe his small rooms, a maze strung with clotheslines of drying prints, bread husks used to wipe ink from the copper plates. His pants worn shiny (as a machinist’s). When they were actually wearing clothes, he and his helpmeet Katherine, Catherine?, (illiterate wife. Apocryphal—the illiterate part?) who enjoyed sitting naked in their garden (also apocryphal?). A post-lapsarian atelier.
***call Art Korner: order paper for intro & advanced classes (Hahnemüle?); ink; buff kitakata. Syllabus.****
Poet brought to the studio the Amherst College Press facsimile portfolio of the ED Master Letters.
I love the inkblots, foxed, embossed creased writing papers, her wild, briary, storm-slanted script. Palpable pain. Cross-hatched words and plus-mark variants (e.g., I cannot talk any more tonight, I cannot stay any longer tonight now, I cannot stay any longer tonight). I almost wrote “any lover” tonight. Which? All? I have not told Tee about my series; don’t want him to clean up his kitchen before I show up to shoot.