Glisk

Having returned to our Colorado house, Cathy and I realized, as we do every visit, that this had been our breakout from what might have been more ritualized lives in New York City. This was our escape, our incarnation.

We drew the design for the house, which we called Tippet Alley, on the back of an envelope, and our contractor based the working schematics on the envelope. At one point he told us that it would be expensive if he followed the exact scale of the windows we’d drawn. We were quick to tell him that it was just a rough idea, not a blueprint. We ended up getting the screen doors which our contractor had won from Don Johnson in a lawsuit in Aspen.

Cathy painted the furniture, the chairs, the counters, designed and threw the tiles for the fireplace, and painted all the acrylics and oils in the house. This was where I polished my Beethoven (that is, polished the wrong notes), and continued the poems I’d been writing to the woods in Bedford.

I cut miles of trails in the woods above our house, ultimately linking up with the Tenth Mountain Trail System, which wends its way through the Holy Cross and Frying Pan Wilderness areas to Aspen, and thereafter south, wilderness all the way to Mexico. So behind our house we had a million acres of lakes, woods, and mountains, which could only be accessed on foot, horseback, or ski. No planes, no snowmobiles, no cars, no bikes.

I used large shears on the trails, so I was quiet and it was a workout. Mountain lions and bears watched me, but none of them felt threatened. Possibly the shears deterred them from trying to eat me.

This was the desk where my poems came to me over the next thirty years. Without the woods or the trails, I wouldn’t have had the momentum to try to make my mind rhyme with the silence of the forest, or imitate small flutters in the canopy.

As Camus wrote in The Stranger, a minute in nature is enough to think about during an entire lifetime in prison. I had always thought that long views out over the rolling lawns and groves of the backcountry would be inspiring, but I realized that the tiny details of the understory, the tendrils, matting, seed leaves, brambles, vines, branches, leaves were a fugue; the whole view was symphonic, more notes than I could play.

Having stumbled into the Second Viennese School of music with Russell Sherman, I modeled his, Beethoven’s, Schenker’s, and Adorno’s ideas of structure to my life. I shaped poems after fugues, and after sonatas.

The first house we built became combination of fugues, trails, clues, and absolute passion. It is still here in the way we’ve tended the trees and copses, in the roads we’ve cut, the views we’ve cleared, in the log piles, the aspen fencing, in the oak floors, the accidental framing of the windows, the stonework around the house.

So I wrote a poem to it, using “Glisk” in the sense of Vermeer’s spotlighting of a glass of milk, a kind of cathode ray silhouetting of incidental details around which the larger picture rages. Like my poem “Delft Light,” “Glisk” points out how a small glimmer of light leads to thoughts

of how the universe singles out objects, glitches in the larger view, or how a painter’s hand touches our incidental presence in passing.

Our time on the planet is short. But the thoughts that come from its luxuriant lost horizons are the building blocks of its constantly recomposing matter. They’ll be in there somewhere.