Once upon a time it was a dark and stormy night.

Let it be known that the writing burrow is made. I wish for foreign language abilities in English, to express finished and no longer in progress. za-made. pro-made. the burrow est arrivee. little building out of barn wood in the outlier Kentucky hills, the wicker chairs and the screened wooden porch, the frog pond, the crickets and cicadas.  the humidity.

the burrow manifesting at the same rate as the work. i’ve been all the builders: of the place, of the sculpture, of the lighting, the letting it through of the objectness, and the seeing, the fortune seeing, the practice in both directions, outward to the viewer participant, and inward, throughward inside the fortune, the voice tracing the silhouette of what was told.

There is a cougar in the nearest woods. I learned from people here that the federal wildlife map showing no cougars East of the Rockies since the early 20th century is just plain wrong.  They didn’t have to convince me, my encounter was in the Blue Ridge.  Two hunters told she won’t bother humans and that I’ll never see her, but as someone who has personally been stalked by a cougar, breathed upon, I acknowledge a new dynamic about the place. i’m sure she makes a great living here. im sure the balances of nature are in effect.

there has always been a place in the woods, behind the smaller of two watering holes, a place abovebehind that i am ordered by a stern internal knowing to look away, to pass quickly, to get out, move along, not even to note what the place looks like, except as the close branches one must avoid passing quickly off path.

this time I hear from people who are here every day, the Amish, and hunters, there’s cougar tracks and a boneyard, an animal boneyard. hers, I think.  I make an agreement with her. she doesn’t bother my dog, and I don’t bother her watering hole. she was here first. there has always been that place in the woods, now I learn why, the quiet nothingness that pushes like a balloon between thought and the day, the hollow I can’t look in because I am not permitted even to notice it.

There’s a red fox who darts across the open area like a cartoon drawing of himself, and coyote, snakes and turtles, and most of all frogs.  what is frog, as a totem animal, as a metaphor, a symbol? change and evolution? the living night echo?   what is frog?  and why am i required so much frog? and train whistle?  the writing burrow is now. it took everything.

this is night one

july at last

I look at the blank page just to see it. I don’t name it, and I don’t save it. the work. Kentucky.  the creation, whar was I… what was it… bring peace

be love

who gets it right?

the world like a six-levered claw machine at the fair, so many letters and applications and projects of straight-line thinking, remembering to write for grants and residencies and fleapowderships.  i made this place in the woods so I can get away. i chose location for trees and hills. I wasn’t seeking a pond, but there it was, as what to look at, what is to be seen is… reflection.  a quarter-acre sized mirror that shows underwoods that reach below to Nabokov‘s exquisitely described other-side puddle world.

I stoke the Buddha with Oreos and wait for the work that I’m here to fabricate.  I listen for it, and hear the rumbling hog’s breath of motorcycle swarm out for a summer night ride, snarling through the hills in the dark, around bends, past the glowing, anonymous eyeballs of everything skittering away.

and so I begin to decipher its exact parts, and see the chalk footprints drawn on the porch floorboards, how I would prefabricate the elements of its materialness here. i solve minute problems in the advance of my thought, how will I affix the wire – how will the screen wrap? I see the bar I have to hang overhead in order to weave these bodies downward. I see the first steps. the steps of the very next now. how it forms from the ceiling.

look at caves, it says.