#97: MARFA POETRY MACHINE in 36 Things

--for the night eagle

“Well it’s just that Elizabeth Taylor’s head keeps getting in the way.  But I am there, mostly behind her left ear.”

                  --Ed Graczyk, Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmie Dean, Jimmie Dean

The Lannan Foundation presented me with a generous fellowship to live and write in beautiful Marfa, Texas for two months.   My mother thinks I’ve pulled off a bank heist that anyone would be foolish enough to pay me to write my poems.  I said, “I know Mom I know, it’s amazing with all the love our country gives to war and genocide that there’s any left over for a poet!”  I did 36 things a day for 36 days, taking notes between each thing, the notes harvested later for the poems.  Here is a list of the things I did to create the MARFA POETRY MACHINE:

1:  SAGE POETS

Burn sage to honor a different living poet each morning, saying the poet’s name out loud while wearing a ceramic hamsa my friend Erica Kaufman gave me.

2:  CRYSTAL SOUSE

Place the day’s food on my crystal altar, the steady pulse of crystal frequencies saturating plants, beans and grains.

3:  REIKI SUNRISE BEFORE SUNRISE

Watch sunrise on Edgar Cayce Institute Meditation Room webcam in Virginia Beach while giving Reiki to myself, preparing for the sun’s arrival in Texas. 

4:  REIKI SUNRISE

Watch sunrise on porch while giving myself Reiki.  Setting my day by the sun plugs me into the natural clock.

5:  YOKO MOLECULAR INFUSION

While cooking breakfast play the song RISING by Yoko Ono.

6:  CELL KNITTING

Chew each mouthful of breakfast 36 times, meditating on food cells becoming my own cells of Yoko-Crystal infusion.

7:  ELVIS PENETRATING CRYSTAL
Meditate on a postage stamp of Elvis Presley (a gift from friend Jenn McCreary) through a clear shaft of flawless citrine, the guardian gemstone of manifestation.

8:  ELVIS BLACKOUT

Wearing headphones sitting inside a closet with door closed listening to the length of one Elvis song different each day then as it finishes take notes by flashlight.

9: MARFA GRATITUDE

Standing in front of the house on Summer Street taking a slow 360-degree view, grateful for the people who make Marfa what it is.  You can surround yourself with the best art in the world, but what actually makes a town is its citizens, and Marfa is home to some of the most thoughtful people I have ever met. 

10:  LOG BENCH VISUALIZATION

Sit on log bench in Summer Street Park.  Gaze at the landscape without blinking.  Close eyes and remember what was seen.  Open eyes and look for what was missed.  With each day the contents of the landscape grows more complete inside.  Later while falling asleep I visualize the park, seeing the details clearer and clearer through the weeks.

11:  GIANT SEGMENTS

Watch five and a half minutes of the movie GIANT that was filmed in Marfa, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean.

12:  COLOR COORDINATES

Focus on a color outside the Pueblo Market on cars, sidewalks, buildings, or the sky. Then walk the market aisles to find the color on cans and other packaging.  Read the ingredients of canned peas as if it is the legend to a map.

13:  PINE SENTINEL

All my life I’ve made friends with trees.  I take my magnifying glass to the giant pine growing behind an abandoned building near Pueblo Market.  She is tall and old and Donald Judd must have taken notice of her perfect symmetry of branches holding herself in spaces of green, brown, and angelic exhale of crown.

14:  APHRODITE’S ELEMENT

Place a penny on railroad tracks next to the post office.  Copper is the metal of Aphrodite – the goddess of Love – and we must not forget her element in our lives.

15:  SOTOL SNAKE SAUNTER

Walk a snake pattern through the long rows of enormous sotol plants at the corner of Oak & High outside The Chinati Foundation.

16:  SHUT UP AND SLIDE

At the Travis E. Self Memorial Park climb the sliding board.  Take notes at the top.  Send the notebook down the slide then follow it no matter who watches.

17:  RAILROAD PYRAMID

Climb hill near MARFA RAILROAD PEN.  Face across tracks, find three stationary objects then imagine a line connecting them.  Study contents of triangle especially look for the large dark chicken, she lives there and she is a beautiful chicken.

18:  CHICKEN SONGS

Sing to the large dark chicken even if she’s not visible.  But sing like a chicken, one very large dark chicken serenade she might appreciate.

19:  MARFA HIBACHI

Stand at intersection of Highland Avenue and San Antonio Street imagining a restaurant with a giant canvas at the entrance with brushes and paints for customers to add to.  The choice to not paint is a thousand dollars for a glass of water, a salad, or cookie, the high price of denying collaboration.

20:  JUDD’S FALLEN GIANT

For years I’ve viewed Donald Judd’s work in museums as an immersed study on chakras, spinal discs aligned and lit from within.  In Marfa I drive down South 67 to see Judd’s massive concrete blocks in the desert, like the remains of a fallen giant a kilometer in length, spinal cord fossils with flesh of Texas wind and sand.

21:  MARFA ALOHA

Give a stranger a poetry broadside.

22:  DESERT WITCHES

Read five pages a day of Marc Simmons’s 180 page book, WITCHCRAFT IN THE SOUTHWEST:  Spanish & Indian Supernaturalism on the Rio Grande.  (I found myself routing for the witches, no matter what prejudices the author attempted to instill.)

23: WITCH DANCE WORKOUT

Each day I sit on floor to follow Mary Wigman’s Witch Dance like a Jane Fonda workout video for the spirit.  I believe Wigman may be the first contemporary dancer to consciously turn dance into a trauma release ritual.  In an interview she said, “I was once completely confused and unhappy.  I locked myself in the guest room of my parent’s home and in great consternation I sobbed and cried because I did not know anymore what to do with my life.  There on the spot I discovered suddenly that in all my unhappiness I was moving and I was moving in such a way that I had never moved before.  And also suddenly this moving became an expression, speaking out.”  --Mary Wigman, dancer and choreographer. 

24:  SWEET POTATO BABY DOLL

The grocer said my sweet potato is organic, but I love all sweet potatoes, organic or filled with toxic sprays and fucked up genes.  I cradle my sweet potato, breast feed my sweet potato, rock her back and forth, singing her name, Tara, Tara.  My mother said this would have been my name if I had been born a girl.

25:  REGRET-REVERSAL SPELL

Close eyes and think of an embarrassment from the past.  Imagine the former self in the situation shrugging and laughing.

26:  WE ARE ALL COGS OF A BEAUTIFUL MACHINE

Find one natural item a day, a twig, little stone, feather, a bit of fluff on a breeze, and wind it, twist it into my longest strands of hair.

27:  COGS OF A MARFA POETRY MACHINE

Arrange found natural items on back porch, a growing machine.

28:  PAGE 36

Read page 36 of a book by a different Lannan fellow each day.

29:  YOKO MOLECULAR INFUSION PART TWO

While cooking supper play the 2007 song YES, I’M A WITCH by Yoko Ono.  “Each time we don’t say what we want to say we’re dying.”

30:  CELL KNITTING PART TWO

Chew each mouthful of supper 36 times, meditating on food cells becoming my own cells of Crystal-Yoko infusion.

31:  REIKI SUNSET

Watch sunset over the desert at end of Third Street while giving myself Reiki.  (I’ll have two sunrises a day but only one sunset to cheat the grave.)

32:  LOST HORSE

Have one shot of Jack Daniels at The Lost Horse Saloon to meet people and enjoy this space where one night a woman rode a beautiful white horse INTO THE BAR.  Ask Tim Johnson at the Marfa Book Company, we were having a drink together.  The lost horse always finds its way.

33:  MARFA LIGHTS

Look for the Marfa Lights at the viewing station on Route 90.  Every night I saw them, sometimes as balls of white light rising from the earth, other nights riding the air sideways and changing colors.  Someone told me they were reflected car lights.  I said, “Oh really, then what were they in 1888 and earlier, long before the metal horse arrived in Marfa?”

34:  FOR THE ARCHITECTS WE LIVE WITH

Each night I play the CD DUET FOR PEN & PENCIL, ELECTRIC DIRT, composed by Christine Olejniczak.  Then I walk from room to room with a flashlight to study the house designed by architect Kristin Bonkemeyer.  I pause in each room to note THIS is where I write in Kristin’s drawing, THIS is where I play music in Kristin’s drawing, THIS is where I cook, eat and dream in Kristin’s drawing.

35:  PECCARY VIGIL

Sit quietly on front porch hoping to spot the tribe of javelinas who like to eat the prickly pear cactus in the yard.  Several nights THERE THEY WERE, little chattering tusks, hairy, stinky, and glorious to behold.

36:  SAGE POETS PART TWO

Burn sage to honor a deceased poet each evening.  For instance, R.I.P. Amiri Baraka who died the first week I was in Marfa.