Migration

Follow the herds, there's always an animal that's weak or a single step slower. You work the edges, cut out the one you want, give chase. Working as a pack, you keep the pressure on. It may take a few days, but you run the prey to ground. Just a military brat, not a wolf, or anything exciting. A quiet kid. Quiet kids survive. You make a lot of noise and someone is going to shut you up. Like that. I only understand the circumstances of my birth in a vague way. My Dad was on leave, between tours of duty. If your parents are military, you move a lot, every two years, sometimes every year, and you never make friends. Not the way that people who stay in one place and gather knowledge do. What an awkward sentence. I wasn't trying for an awkward sentence. What I was saying must have been difficult to say. Thinking is difficult, you notice that? Remembering is a burden, the way the past is a heavy pack. Snowshoe into a tree-tip pit where you build a fire and heat some broth. No claim, no blanket, just a starry night and the wind from Calgary. They do wind well there, understanding every nuance of inconvenience. If it wasn't for the museum, I'd simply move on now. Attachment is a sticky issue. But I really like my job, handling art, mopping floors in a modified chevron, the fantail loop, sharing an Irish at the pub; I could give it up, but I don't want to. I'm comfortable enough here, I see my next meal, I'm tired of moving books from one place to another. Sing "Misty" for me. I could start one more new life, probably, maybe Arkansas. I'm only looking to fade into the ether. A blues note, John Lee Hooker, something about that voice. Talk therapy. Reading the new Annie Proulx. Her take on having a house built, dealing with access, and moving the books one last time. Must be a private super bowl party at the bar next door. People with cheese hats. I have to ask who's playing. They look at me as if I'm joking, these people in cheese hats. I walk over to Kroger and buy an old remaindered Brie, some olives, and celery, to scoop the warm cheese. Spend the super bowl reading about archival storage. I spend a useful hour in the Richard's gallery, where we installed Brent's The Matrix Series, in the dark, with a flashlight. An interesting installation of these pieces would be in a gallery where the walls were covered with black velour and the pedestals were black. Just light, and the pieces. The one or two nights a week that I have a drink with Anthony, we talk about installations, what we've liked, what we might do. A sense of collaboration that I seldom feel, but always enjoy when it happens. Building a house with someone, hiking several days in to a place with slot-canyons and alarming hieroglyphs on the rock walls, cooking with another person. We talk about pure space, empty space, ways it might be filled. Kindred spirits in the way we want to keep one foot grounded, either in the materials or the arrangement of the materials. Two shots of Irish, with a Murphy's back, and we're talking a patois that only, right then, the two of us understand. Private conversation. I spend most of my time alone, more than half, sometimes two-thirds, more than most people want, and seldom talk on the phone, so even the idea of collaboration doesn't occur to me. Writing is a solitary vice. But I can imagine doing an installation with Anthony, something off the wall that might actually be on the wall. Or maybe the floor. My good friend Roy, in Mississippi, talking about the dust that's raised when using a hoe to chop weeds, said that no one knew a place unless they'd eaten the dirt. Geophagy. Davenport mentions eating blue clay in South Carolina. I've eaten clay most places I've lived, it's like library paste with added grit. Who knows? Maybe it tells my body something. Like taking a teaspoon of local honey dissolved in an once of local cider vinegar. Good to able to talk the language, even if you dress incorrectly for whatever the event is. I've worked on this paragraph for twelve hours, and all I do is take words out. Eventually you'd end up with nothing. I'd like to write a few more sentences, so the paragraph would be a block, with a jagged right edge. I have to be careful, talking to myself, because then I try to make things happen. Create a square where a rectangle would do. Or even a single line. The opening of a poem, Emily run through Emerson, or better, through Thoreau, might comment on the color of the sky, or the last vestige of green:

My world is haloed now...

And then go on to talk about fireflies or northern lights or something. Natural discharges of extra energy lit from above. The sky is blue because it falls within a narrow band. We call it blue. It's a name, merely. I call it Cubist Gray, but that falls more toward green. Whatever color would cover your mistakes. Call it off-white, something off-white leaning toward warmer rather than cooler. Less blue, or, heaven forbid, more green. Why does that strike a chord? You brought me here. Answer for you own self. I'm perfectly happy with the gators and snakes, my pallet works anywhere, I unfold it and sleep the sleep of the innocent. A trick I learned. Don't trust me with a pack of cards. I can make an elephant disappear with a wave of my hand.