The Keen of Winter Swans, voles and grey foxes.

The arch lesson in survival this post presupposes is entirely a metaphysical one, if such one exists. Like all we ascribe to the scurrying, mate-guarding and brooding of swans, voles and grey foxes how so far does the human's tremendous physical and emotional need ache to be satisfied at almost any cost? What I am left with is this active sense, under difficult thriving conditions, an overwintering... I am spent this evening by Louise Erdrich's poem about finality, forecasts, and of course, "the weird sisters" ...

"Three Sisters" by Louise Erdrich

Arlene wore the eyes of an old man around her neck.
Scratched porcelain, washed down
with the hot lye of his breath.

Dalona rode love like a ship in light wind.
The sails of her body unfurled at a touch.
No one could deny her safe passage, safe harbor.

Thedda, the youngest, was shut like a bell.
The white thorns of silence prickled in each bush
where she walked, and the grass stopped growing where she stood.

One year the three sisters came out of their rooms,
swaying like the roses that papered their walls.
They walked, full grown, into the heart of the town.

Young men broke their eyes against their eyes of stone,
and singed their long tongues
on the stunned flames of their mouths.

It was in late August, in the long year of drought.
The pool halls were winnowed and three men drew lots
to marry the sisters, all six in a great house.

On the night of the wedding the wind rose on a glass stem.
The clouds lowered in live heat.
We tethered our dogs.

Some swore they saw a hoop of lighting dance down in their yard.
Toward dawn, we felt the weight of lead sinkers in our bones,
walked out, and caught the first, fast drops on our tongues.

Sestina

"Without protection, you are making love to AIDS. Protect yourself."

After the meal, your wrappered skewer points to the sexual--
Related places--on the rough map of the table. Memory jolts
The level of our glasses unless our legs sit, and stand the personal
A mixing it has come to mean, and a canceling equilibrium.
Sign up for a course in the genre, because we're here leading
The questioning to make way to the fore, and placement of yes

Yes, it will be enough, duly influences too little of the yesses
The chapped flint pieces nothing else will serve, but the sexual.
So that the fire is made universal, I feel it in my skin, the leading
Edge of our technology, I see it in your eyes like having taken a jolt
Of whiskey. Finally whisked into mutual adjustment, capturing equilibrium
Again, we hover off the mark of each other's adaptation of the personal.

Prying off this layer puzzled that we come again, to our personal
Effects: imagining ourselves in them expands into a story of yes,
And I will be found dead with a copy in my pocket if equilibrium
Chances to find me, if nowhere else the unpartitioned sexual
Encounter with all that we sacrificed for it, spilling out of us, if a jolt
Daliesque, we fashion each torso into a chest of drawers as leading

As a stare. Stay in hotels, in creative silence, until whose leading
The race against loss? Life's difficulties are dependably personal
That hungry. Until a French ad campaign finds us badly jolted
Out of that stance, and trapped among hinged legs. But for the yes
On my lips, and sucking the color-drenched dreams of the sexual.
Thinking about particular realities, a big sleep to come, of equilibrium.

Disarticulates the sting (in the wrong direction) of an equilibrium
We read and write by, and beyond the breaking of all things leading
Towards their long-anticipated end, we are claimants of the sexual.
Kisses to your pink parts--before the flush of exposure, personal
Or otherwise. Confinement to any particular locale or station of yes
Yes it's a shame it might come. I am not dismayed by clandestine jolts

Of electricity we loosed into the public arena, which is just another jolt
Felt as the visceral truths, the furtive in-betweens of life-giving equilibrium,
Your hands flex nervously, or in grief? Smoothing all deformities in yes
Yes, a death wish of the species, rather what befalls the vulnerable, leading
Five cardinal points encompassing the whole question of the sexual.
Similarly covered, we slowly recover from our shared view of the personal

It is this yes, yes sometimes humane or sometimes hairy leading
Us onto further shame to make us modest, beautiful, if jolting our equilibrium--
The sexual corrects a personal sense of being recognized as our own.

Past and Present Nests

Internal Improvements

I often paint young girls who are reading. It’s surely because I saw the act of reading as a way to enter life’s deeper secrets. Reading is the great means of access to myths. Green, Gracq, Char, Jouve, Michaux, and Artaud were frequent passageways, as well as the great holy writings of the Bible and initiates like Dante, Rilke, the Pléiade poets, the great Chinese writers, the mystics John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, not to mention Carroll, the pure German poet Ludwig Tieck, and Indian epics. All these texts and authors were landmarks in my life, and gave me another dimension of time to which I soon felt myself summoned. My young girls who read in dreaming poses are escaping from fleeting, harmful time . . . Fixing them in the act of reading or dreaming prolongs a privileged, splendid, and magic glimpsed-at time. A suddenly opened curtain sheds light from a window and is seen only by those who know how. Thus a book is a key to open a mysterious trunk containing childhood scents...

from Balthus: Vanished Splendors, the book here

Sharon Olds: (Guess the Title)

In the taxi alone, home from the airport,

I could not believe you were gone. My palm kept

creeping over the smooth plastic

to find your strong meaty little hand and

squeeze it, find your narrow thigh in the

noble ribbing of the corduroy,

straight and regular as anything in nature, to

find the slack cool cheek of a

child in the heat of a summer morning—

nothing, nothing, waves of bawling

hitting me in hot flashes like some

change of life, some boiling wave

rising in me toward your body, toward

where it should have been on the seat, your

brow curved like a cereal bowl, your

eyes dark with massed crystals like the

magnified scales of a butterfly's wing, the

delicate feelers of your limp hair,

floods of blood rising in my face as I

tried to reassemble the hot

gritty molecules in the car, to

make you appear like a holograph

on the back seat, pull you out of nothing

as I once did—but you were really gone,

the cab glossy as a slit caul out of

which you had slipped, the air glittering

electric with escape as it does in the room at a birth.
Speaking of Gaitskill's unique appropriation of Sade--I have always eroticized this poem, as speaker and object.

At six years old, I painted this house Grapeshake, and yes, the Pantone color exists.

The Royal Tenenbaums - Margot's bath TV

After the Solstice: Breathing and Brooding

The sexual, jolts one's personal equilibrium, the world's leading

eyes:

My project for today, tonight:

"French Ad Campaign"

A sestina using the following end words:
sexual, jolts, personal, equilibrium, leading, yes