DOOR CENTO

If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one's entire life. Is there pleasure when there is a passage, there is when every room is open. Now all the doors and windows are open, and we move so easily through the rooms. On May nights, when so many doors are closed, there is one that is just barely ajar. Outside there is everything to see in nights never dark enough to hide completely the shapes of things. The flag snaps and tugs at the pole beside the door. The front door key is hidden under the aloe. Why not sense that, incarnated in the door, there is a little threshold god? It knocks at the door, which is the surface of existence. The last door to the last room comes unlatched. A little sign of an entrance is the one that made it alike. Words with doors so the reader could gaze, enter and leave. There are two urns of painted porcelain flanking the door. A knob in the door; people go in the house, they live there.

Materials from Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1994), Melody S. Gee's Each Crumbling House (Perugia Press, 2010), Mark Irwin's Large White House Speaking (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2013, Federico García Lorca's Poet in New York: Bilingual Edition (FSG Classics, 2013), Lyn Hejinian's My Life and My Life in the Nineties (Wesleyan University Press, 2013), Dawn Lundy Martin's Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books, 2014), Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons: Centennial Edition (City Lights Publishers, 2014), with lines Francoise Minkowska as quoted by Bachelard.

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BODY CENTO

Are we grain or pearl or urchin bone? Human sense organs, like all sense organs, must be understood as successful adaptations to the facts of nature; they are, as it were, the organism's responses to nature's address. The Atlantic expands (America departing Europe) the same distance each year that our fingernails grow. Physically, the creature endowed with a sense of refuge, huddles up to itself, takes to cover, hides away, lies snug, concealed. At school, the choral director described the torso in terms of the muscles of sound. The body is a sounding board, and it has an attunement resulting from its cut, covering, or cavities. We were not at the margin but on the border, mind lost to body, skirt over our head. Wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones. I gazed at the cadaver and held its heart, removed from a once melodious cavity. At peace in memory, heavenly body, circumference, boundary, you cry on the shores of a horse's eye. The body goes and the head seeks matter. We start to dream of a house that grows in proportion to the growth of the body that inhabits it. Beginning from the body, a moving thing, we perceive. The prairie air, driven by the shepherds, trembled in fear like a mollusk without a shell. The knowledge is embodied—and the body is trembling, terrified, because it's unprepared, it forgot to get ready, it forgot to buy food, it forgot to dress. Ancient symbolics used the shell as a symbol for the human body, which encloses the soul in an outside envelope, while the soul quickens the entire being, represented by the organism of the mollusk. An enclosure blends with the same that is to say there is blending. Garden snails are edible. If there exists a borderline surface between such an inside and outside, this surface is painful on both sides.

Materials from Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1994), Gernot Böhme's Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Melody S. Gee's Each Crumbling House (Perugia Press, 2010), Federico García Lorca's Poet in New York: Bilingual Edition (FSG Classics, 2013), Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons: Centennial Edition (City Lights Publishers, 2014).

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TIME CENTO

Winter is by far the oldest of the seasons. Suppose it is within a gate which open is open at the hour of closing summer that is to say it is so. I stood long at the gate watching cows in tranquility. This winter will not come again and no other will be like it. On snowy days, the house too is old. Winter is always inside the slouching leaves and stalks sugaring the clay. Before the gods existed, the woods were sacred, and the gods came to dwell in these sacred woods. It is as if the dust cast off by the redwoods and perpetually forming the atmosphere of the forest with its warm yellow light and cold blue shadows makes a prison of the air, or prism, which confines the light. Late October and winter is already where you are. It involves in time meditation and out of time narration. Great images have both a history and a prehistory; they are always a blend of memory and legend, with the result that we never experience an image directly. This is so nice and sweet and yet there comes the change, there comes the time to press more air. History is not enough. It is we who are ominous; the future promises nothing. For instance before when there was a separation there was a waiting now when there is separation there is the division between intending and departing. Sure we are all in and as our times, but some are more in and as it than others. In the imagination, to go in and come out are never symmetrical images. I want you, too, to have this experience, so that we are more alike, so that we are closer, bound together, sharing a point of view—so that we are "coming from the same place."

Materials from Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1994), Melody S. Gee's Each Crumbling House (Perugia Press, 2010), Lyn Hejinian's My Life and My Life in the Nineties (Wesleyan University Press, 2013), Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons: Centennial Edition (City Lights Publishers, 2014).
 

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This series sort of fell in my lap. I was writing into the idea of home in another series and decided I wanted to read up on it. My "research" ranged from poets I saw as concerned with the "domestic" (Kenyon and Stein representing perhaps two poles for the continuum of that term) and some aesthetic/architectural theory (Bachelard and Böhme). What I found fascinating was the even though each wrote at different times, from different experiences, in different genres, some even through translation, they all of seemed to pull from similar lexicons and image banks. I started noting when I saw a recurrence and found they all seemed to fit together. And it felt a bit like a modeling of how one builds a home—gathering disparate materials into one structure, into a room.