Bone Structure

This is an acreage of blue, alfalfa flowering, a flood that covers the contours of the land, and suggests what is underneath.  She has good bone structure.  When the wind comes, blue and green argue for prominence.  Her skirt is shimmering rayon in summer light.  Something, invisible, is happening.  In winter, snow does something similar, like linen sheets defeating her sexuality.  And, with time will come the fabric's thinning, parchment wearing to crepe and tissue.  The ice blue of spring's creeks, the burnt red of autumn leaves, these colors puncture this thin veil of winter.  The old woman's blood is just below the surface, like the alfalfa, like the wheat.  The landscape remembers, like her features, framed by the long strands of her hair, spun cotton, bleached.  The sapphires of her eyes are still bright, but fading, chalk from the bluffs bubbling up in the flat lands, killing the possibility in the land.  Possibility in the land, you want to know and command the fecund mystery of seasons.  Her breasts, her thighs, the flat belly anticipates her desire, the desire she evokes in men, evoked when she was young and her flesh and fat was flushed with warm blood.  Summer is still humming, the hidden voice in the alfalfa.  There is a secret beauty built on the bone structure of the land.  

Lie down, lady fair, lie down naked and let the wet marshes absorb you.  The tendrils of your hair and the roots of tree and weed intermingle.  Your body is the cresting hill, the coulee's cleft.  What will be left of you?  The seasons turn and tease and please you.  You return.  The landscape personifies your beauty, remembering, with a shiver, your bone structure.

de-Camp

This familiar, forgotten place recalls my childhood.  The land loses light early, the sun running up the mountains like an Incan, like a Greek.  That which is ancient beguiles me, measures the distances between myself and the world.  History is one gorgeous sigh (of relief and despair) that carries us further, downstream.  

The days passing, a drum and trumpet, the dull march of time.  Detritus slowly chokes the pool; sentiment levels everything, more evidence--your eyes already recognize--the necessity of floods...  The landscape changes, gradually.  The seasons retrieve our memories, but this blanket of leaves is not that blanket of leaves (little comfort, knit tight beneath my chin).  

And I know nothing of the winter.  Inside, until now, I have always been a furnace, a wild fire besieging some childhood map to treasures, the lines of wax crayons bleeding, blurring, and curling the page.  The bonanza, the apocalypse, the first hard freeze:  prophets get away with their predictions.  Their mirrors match the wrinkles that they wear, and everyone knows what the future is made of, the blue lips and fingers of January.  

But it is still summer now:  engine summer, a black train snaking along the river, gripping the slick, steel, rails, trailing my dreams, seeming mythical, becoming only sound.  The drum, the trumpet, the dumb singer stinging the precious sunlight with the absence of her tongue.  Time is a long view up the landscape that expands in the failing light.  There is not a day that contains it, a week, a year.  Time and its forgeries accumulate.  They cover the (valley) floor.

Body in Landscape

The same road snaking along the same contours of the same mountain, the colors are indelible. Nothing changes. From where the brilliant teal of the waves crash and shatter like glass on the black rocks, to the confusion brought on by rain and elevation--the profusion of greens and the primeval, fairy-tale flowers that invade all of one's senses--this place retains. Imagine returning in five-year intervals, your body--for brief respite--pasted in this landscape and thus analyzed (internally) by the factor of change. One might think that in this repetition one would uncover continuity and context; after all, this body is the same body moving through the same landscape. Everything and everyone keeps their familiar names. Instead, there is neither comfort nor calm, this series of returns merely stirs up more contrast and consideration. Memories measure all experience and so-called facts react with and against ideas that are fleeting, ideas that are coveted, ideas that are etched in stone. The current is a combination of things: past obstructions, whispered breezes, eddies that like labyrinths lead nowhere. The present is a package never fully opened. Thus, one knows the landscape (knows one's own body as well) from the distance of one's associations. The purity of the first encounter, defrayed as it is from the investment of memory and the trembling of expectation, is impossible to recover. There is nothing essentially anything (tragic, liberating, superior) about this state of affairs. It is simply that; and one goes on walking--as best one can--through the landscape.

a scape

There is a brittle expectation in the word--scape--as if the whole construction were on the verge of scattering, shattering into a million shards of vision, irreconcilable mirrors. The landscape can't be reached...we are never quite part of it. It trembles on the horizon like the vapors of mirage. The seascape sprays into angles of water and light. The wind erodes the very sand on which we stand, sandstone statues bronzing in the bright destruction of the idea of summer. The cityscape, with all of its erect edges and lines, consists of the reverberation and the tension of the hive. Lives crowd out other lives and every character is cornered...
this is something like a more mature Delirium. Beyond the brooding existential sentimentality-the pining for another body in some dark cellar--this plot thickens with lives matured into their madness, beyond love, beyond sentiment, beyond being...therefore--lets call her Ruth--sits in the middle of the map with scapes laid out before her in quaintly contradictory directions. But she does not integrate with the cityscape any more that she would/could a pounding sea. Life is observation; other cages cataloged from the specificity of one's own confinement.
All of the intertwining tales are captivating. There is a claustrophobia that opens inside the characters, how loneliness absorbs the soul...