radiant heat

figure without landscape

Figure without landscape,
white with the many names of snow,
she makes her house
of skin and snow.
Alone
for the others are dead,
she is a small Arctic sun
curving space around her.
This world swirls,
changes with every wind.
She must shape the world
by being alive.

At times the wind is elsewhere,
no snow falls,
the sky's lights crackle and hiss.
Lost as the sun
among all stars,
she hears the whole night
name her,
Small Small
Here-by-chance
Belonging-nowhere-meaning-nothing.
She says stubbornly nothing
but poems come from her hands:
she finds food.

from "Woman On/Against Snow" by Pat Lowther

"a cold place inside us the body can't convert"

Arctic Carving by Pat Lowther

They say it's country of dream:

so few go there

a cold place inside us

the body can't convert

There light falls in separate flakes

into the world mesh

Creation of all things

spreads outward

And there a man who had

never seen trees

was visited by trees of ivory

shaping themselves against his knife

No leaves suggested themselves

only rudiments of branching

only the blunt pure shapes

essence of trees

where like the mind at point zero

a white bird rested

"soon I will take a sharp stick and begin"

"The ice forest grows
like a speeded film of stalagmites forming
While I watch, antlered trees
fur a whole ridge"

from "In The Continent Behind My Eyes" by Pat Lowther

the black one

The Black One

The black horse has five legs.
Nothing cold clings to the black horse.
The black horse wears snow definitively,
defiantly.
The black horse's muscles love the black horse
and the black horse loves its muscles.
When the black horse senses danger
some of its muscles separate, loom
to look larger, and its center legs canter out.
There is so much love in the black horse.
I want to be one.

(when i first came upon these horses they appeared as one, the larger horse sheltering the smaller. this seems to happen often - such an act of love.)

Folk's Lore and The Stone Circle

Dandelions, grand babies, the song and its chorus,
eyes and clocks orbicular for spherically sound strata.

The line of time we see is the spine of the circle,
circumference laid out, mystery's furrow.

Give us a forest and stroke it with wind,
we understand seasons and life's fodder, what's interim.

Give us some heat, some rain, putrefaction 
and mushrooms rescind all disbelief
for that which seals its seam to proliferate... 

aha! - overnight someone/something 
rearranges space!

after all isn't stuff the articulation of starlight
and dust the dissemination of the sonata.

under the influence of egon schiele, ii

"...the fruit which will leave eternal vitality behind even after its decay."

from a letter to his mother, March 1913