What happens when you see a lake glisten in a shard of late-afternoon sun? What happens when you enter the shadow of an imposing rock formation? What happens when you try to express the feeling of these moments—the thisness to yourself, to others, in words, through music? Does the expression undo the essence of that experience? Does naming a feeling destroy that feeling? Are you left only with a husk of the moment: only your music, your words, only yourself? Through poetry, and music composed entirely from recordings of that poetry, Field Notes explores, and perhaps plays out, this potential paradox.
Text:
I. Horse Rock Ridge, Crawfordsville, OR
I looked for a horse in the galloping rocks—
(rocks that gallop? pits like eyes? striations like the texture of a tail?)—
but found nothing,
not even the hillside which flared as it fell
like the skirt of a saddle,
nor the road down the mountain which tightened and sagged
like the hollow between two heaving ribs.II. Shotgun Creek, Mabel, OR
Only the tiptoeing of a mouth
singing silently along to silence.III. Cascade Lake, Orcas Island, WA
Across the surface of the lake, light shatters,
skids into every cove and shadow,
pockmarks the blue with jagged yellows,
craggy whites—mottled—golds, barbed and damp.
It as if the light is not the light—the cratered waters not the lake—
but a broken window on a kitchen floor,
and my interpretive look—as if loving—
a grimy baseball I’d chucked through it.