Quartet

Cole Swensen

RICHARD LONG WALKS ACROSS ENGLAND (1997)

That the body becomes architecture as soon as it starts to walk:

Witness:

It is witness to the day. To the torque, which is the sun, which is walking away.

Richard Long, in his intricate maps, free of detail, and meticulously tracked: the arc of the hand in the act:

and then off it walked across the page. Exit. Nave.

Took it with it. An apse across what expanse, expanded by

1. A white horse

    carved into a hill of chalk

2. A broken tree

    at once our house

3. A red field

    the essence of a window in that

    that is its distance—architrave

4. A falling bird

    —recognizable curve—more nave, nave, who

    could ever forgive

5. A line of horses in a spine

    that the body could not outbuild

simply by sight

tried the walker

to be that animal

of accidental citadel

or make it up in time.

FAN AS ARC AS HOLD ME ON

based on the premise of the curve:

that the curve is the first move.

Leibniz, clinamen, on

                                and all that arcs therefrom:

would culminate in a fan. In a relatively minuscule and fragile notion all

nothing but gesture: that the arc ended

in a flick of the wrist. Every arc is a window—

Witness:

Cone Collection: Black Chantilly Bobbin Lace Fan Leaf, 1908

the little built

                    divides the sun

the little split

                    sieves the wind

designed by Georges Martin

and manufactured by Compagnie des Indes,

Belgium and France.

Claribel and Etta Cone traveled extensively in Europe

inveterately collecting

yearly from the early 1900s to the late 1920s

with a sideline in lace.

Bobbin lace is based

                           on a distinct architecture

                           determined in advance

with a trace

           of the bee

                           in houses built of cavities

the most important part of any structure is its emptiness

through which

                           what slips

as with any room

                           builds the throng.

Once held in a hand, the hand swung

back and forth against the equal architecture of wind.

7P., CUIS., S. DEB. … À SAISIR

(3 BD, 2 BATH; DON’T MISS OUT!) (1984)

To fold the roam into something you could

get lost within, and this is how

something opens into space that one can hold.

And could held be:

                                    Begin with a stair

then a door

a window just behind

                                    the future

is emptying a room

                                    the room itself

leaving through

the radiator below the window

                                    and all the ghosts are children.

and the window swings shut

in front of everything green.

                                    Called Dream or at least that was what

was written on the mirror.

And beyond the window, again the park, again the same

sense of something shut

                                    and the panes repeated in light

stained across the floor.

                                    Goldfish in the kitchen

                                    Goldfish on the lawn

and the window swings open

                                    now its panes the light divide

and the tree within that light

                                    flying in the wind which rises in the wind

tearing things

                                    that opened a window in the wall

and the feathers

                                    come and go across the woman, old.

The feathers are the snow you held for years until it shut.

Ô SAISONS, Ô CHÂTEAUX (1957)

                                    seen from a window by a hand

striking a match

                                    lighting a candle in the middle of the day,

the candlelight working

                                    its way through the sun carefully

trembling on the stairway carefully turning

                                    symmetry to birds of prey.

(They say the “wings” of the château)

                                    (when they are trying to get away.)

The sound of rakes combing gravel.

Exotic birds alarming gardens

                                    and the labyrinth at its center,

so precisely divided, it divulges a fountain

                                    also combing

                                    also raking;

we hear the rake in the split of it, the slit

in the crack of it, the crick,

green,

      even tryst-green, blitz-green, and built

as a ruin; all châteaux were built as ruins

                                    and so patiently we waited.