The Far Range, Peñasco

 

 

The Far Range, Peñasco

after Afton Love

 

 https://aftonlove.com/artwork/4271134-The-Far-Range-Pe-asco.html

 

 

 

Rippling rock billows from graphite brushed

 

meld to sheer paper by bees’ wax           this butte draws in and blurs      

 

            to soft erasures, ghost-smudge dappled shadowed

 

solid refracting,     shifting shade-and-light cloud marbled in surface

 

blown eon bodies          eroded, molded by sky            

 

hand-magnified dust-in-shape

 

flow-flash of stone       

           

 

 

a grid of perceptions      cuts perspective

 

     windows onto

 

grains of star    

 

lithic motes      

 

dis-erecting wall of time            I can’t take

 

 

 

vision, step          approaches, seeks distance, lingers                 

 

felt topological longing at this threshold

 

lure of mineral sympathy           and entrance into earth’s pure forms

 

spare expanse   into      definite line      now smeared,     effaced and facing

 

depth opens and collapses

 

 

on approach the real dilates,

becomes unknown,

abstraction in that unattainable depth of seeing within

 

 

at too much distance I lose my standpoint,

float outside all that is bound with me

 

 

this dirt swirl into which earth crumbles her shapes

 

 

yet all stance is interval,            measures in motion      

 

                                                of my care, my facts      with her

 

 

 

orientation yields

 

folded gates, living semblance of her interior,

 

open, I stand in             her and my        formation-deformation

 

together stratified          focal pauses of stone’s roving

 

 

perception’s slicing                    slips between fronds of my irises

 

suspends and compacts              accumulates a physique of histories

 

 

activates     earth durations                     felt as here for me        

 

this momentum of human prism

 

blink of shared, elemental flesh

 

mammal’s instance elongated

 

contoured by cliffs convexing

 

unreflected in charcoal-like

 

mirror-lines of wrinkling rock

 

 

I am gathered into this presence

 

thrown among these long predecessors

 

others’ ancestors who will succeed me

 

time’s heft and bulk     she traces in her wide, concaving scrolls

 

still splitting to signs in boulders and handheld shards

 

                        all assemble here

 

 

 

No pure forms observed

 

rather I stand in ranges’ layered touch                            in memory and in future

 

conglomerate of those who emerge, are bared,   

 

                                                eclipse my world,          now and ever move on

 

                                                             horizoned into me       

then beyond    

 

I am opened to our haecceity:    

 

unsolid visitation with palpable impact

 

in- and outcarnates down alluvial lungs

 

 

this matrix of her warping tides     careful geologies of our glyph-inscribed skin

 

this opaque earth      and self, yet earthen vessel,     offered as diaphanous slowness and speed      

 

an inverse contact     in the weathering of my blood-beat