Beginning of November

The light is winter light.
You’ve already felt it
before you can open your eyes,
and now it’s too late
to prepare yourself
for this gray originless
sorrow that’s filling the room. It’s not winter. The light
is. The light is
winter light,
and you’re alone.
At last you get up:
and suddenly notice you’re holding
your body without the heart
to curse its lonely life, it’s suffering
from cold and from the winter
light that fills the room
like fear. And all at once you hug it tight,
the way you might hug
somebody you hate,
if he came to you in tears.

Franz Wright, Ill Lit

Soft Wood
(For Harriet Winslow)

Sometimes I have supposed seals
must live as long as the Scholar Gypsy
Even in their barred pond at the zoo they are happy,
and no sunflower turns
more delicately to the sun
without a wincing of the will.

Here too in Maine things bend to the wind forever.
After two years away, one must get used
to the painted soft wood staying bright and clean,
to the air blasting an all-white wall whiter,
as it blows through curtain and screen
touched with salt and evergreen.

The green juniper berry spills crystal clear gin,
and even the hot water in the bathtub
is more than water,
and rich with the scouring effervescence
of something healing,
the illimitable salt.

Things last, but sometimes for days here
only children seem fit to handle children,
and there is no utility or inspiration
in the wind smashing without direction.
The fresh paint
on the captains' houses hides softer wood.

Their square-riggers used to whiten
the four corners of the globe,
but it's no consolation to know
the possessors seldom outlast the possessions,
once warped and mothered by their touch.
Shed skin will never fit another wearer.

Yet the seal pack will bark past my window
summer after summer.
This is the season
when our friends may and will die daily.
Surely the lives of the old
are briefer than the young.

Harriet Winslow, who owned this house,
was more to me than my mother.
I think of you far off in Washington,
breathing in the heat wave
and air-conditioning, knowing
each drug that numbs alerts another nerve to pain.

Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

It takes about six hours to get to the Spiral Jetty and back again if you’re coming from South Salt Lake City. It really isn’t all that far, but the dirt roads start at the Golden Spike National Historic Site and it’s unavoidably slow going from there. There’s no way even a high-clearance 4WD can negotiate sizable rocks at anywhere near 20 mph, especially on sub-class D roads. One is advised to take it easy. The lack of speed wouldn’t be such a annoyance if the ride wasn’t so bumpy, especially when the CD player goes epileptic and vertebrae stiffen and sore from the never ending jostle. When another car approaches in the opposite direction, they usually pull over on the side to let you pass.

A little metal sign says “Spiral Jetty 16 miles,” after you pass the first cattle guard. There are actually five cattle guards in total, and the last one is still about 2 miles from the final destination. These guards are basically gates with grates; pits with long cylinders across spaced just far enough apart. The cattle get their hooves stuck inside or they don’t even try – I’m not sure how smart they are. Anyway, as you weave closer to Rozel Point, the road becomes a trail and the rocks appear to multiply. A print out guide from the group that manages the Jetty says that the big ones could high center a vehicle or blow out its tires, and that the brush is so rough, it could scratch up a paint job.

Robert Smithson built the Spiral Jetty in 1970 and a study found it to be the most popular work of twentieth century art in all art history textbooks. The whole thing was underwater for a while, but now the water level is even lower than the base of the Jetty. The sand is caked with salt. From the hill it looks indistinguishable from milky water, slightly choppy and smelly. The actual water, which meets the Jetty only at its outermost curve, is more of a pastel grey. It features a kind of slight surface eczema that could possibly result from moving underwater sediment.

Though most drivers are polite when passing by on the trail, they take no issue with parking as close as they can to the Jetty. Their inevitably garish high-clearance vehicles completely ruin the hillside view and stain the landward one as well. Stopping at Rozel Point, by contrast, allows the visitor to amble steadily toward the sculpture, gasping raw, salty air at the virginal glimpse. By choosing to walk, what could have been fragmentary snapshots through a windshield become dignified, continuous panoramas. A sense of pilgrimage is made possible, and the only rocks that need negotiating are those out in the water.

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty