Yesterday I took a sublime day trip to nearby Viroqua, WI, and between that and last weekend I have enough photos and stories to blog for two months. Unfortunately iPhoto is giving me issues lately, so these pictures may be a bit slow to emerge. Again, bear with me!
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Wasps: by Laura Kasischke from the book Space, In Chains (2011).
I stumbled into this place with my suitcase packed full of prior obligations. The floor of the orchard littered with soft fruit, and the wasps hovering drunkenly over it all, and the last few pieces dangling from the branches--happiness, melancholy, sexual desire--poised in the vibrating air, ready to fall.
These systems already existed. So what did they want from me? The deep, deep cosmogony. The rigorous mimicry of genes. Algebra, democracy, infectious diseases. Farm implements, logic, religious convictions. A stick in the river. Music. Linguistics. Sweetheart, it's time to leave...
But, first:
A bus ride to the beach! My mother in a striped suit, with black hair. June. A pail full of sand and water. In the distance, someone on a boat, waving. The crippled girl floating on her back. The old man and the silvery blue consummation, laughing happily, up to his ankles, smiling at me. And my dead grandmother and her simple picnic. Some fruit. Cheese. Some cold fried chicken. The physical universe and its buzzing machinery, its fantastical scenery.
They were all around us that day. In the confusion of the air. In our strange dreams. In the baggage we'd brought with us and would have to leave. In our fading animal memories.
The humming gold of being, and ceasing to be. The exposed motor of eternity.
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