Grey Scale / Zukofsky 1
To become aware of tones
beginner's problem in the mind of the beginner
visualization of white of whiteness
which is impossible
I saw an egret in a scraggly cedar above
Big Spring
Williams said no whiteness is so white as the memory of whiteness
in a cedar or motionless in water/the tall grasses.
2
Silver maple woods what Jennifer named
the scarey woods
scarey so dense and so dark
dense with undergrowth
with heaped-up multiflora rose with jewelweed
damselfly
a or the or neither and darker than
dark
black wings at rest on jewelweed blackness without dots or density.
3
Middle grey
sledge-hammer
to break up cast-iron machines
bow saw to cut down weedy box elders shot up around the machines
time
in which to make a cleared space to find limestone/middle grey
Pound said wind is part of the process
rain part of the process.
4
Three tones + other tones
glaring surface of snow in flat sunlight it's a white world wilful travelers
without colored and coloring glasses
long gone/lost
snow in full shade
white with delicate textures sand dune ripples any Bach fugue
average snow
average white skin the shadow of your smile
leaves of trees their shadows
no snow
dark material dark fur dark grey cat named "Friendly."
5
Three tones + other tones + two tones
Richard Avedon's 1958 photograph of Pound a postcard a bookmark
darker closed
eyes wrinkled texture of sagging skin around eyes
and darker closed lips no texture almost no-tone tone
"but shall have his sorrow for
seafare"
two tones
first suggestions/thresholds of his sorrow.
6
the great photographs are black and white and middle grey
Weston's camera
on Point Lobos reclining shadow of eroded
rock
Ansel Adams at Yosemite and
elsewhere morning star aspen leaves
Stieglitz portraits of Georgia O'Keefe not simply not necessarily great
not because of subject matter this is the American
earth and personages.
7
The great
result of reduction and the composition of reductions
resulting in intensity Williams
said the only human value = intense
intense face of sorrow
on a postcard
although there are other emotions and although there are other
faces.
8
And so I come
to this
to the one/only photograph on my wall
and am I not one of those travellers wilful or merely stubborn
still an isolato still
come
home to Ralph Eugene Meatyard's 1968 photograph
on my wall.
9
No eyes/closed eyes
behind large dark glasses darker than leaves of trees their shadows
made larger/darker by wings/rock eyebrows
the mouth is also closed
unsmiling
face
to shadow face
large on a neck of average white skin.
10
No face = no image = no memory
eyes + mouth + what's been overlooked/unremembered
beginner's error
+ an ear for instance
image of intense attention
what I remember = "only song matters"
not one song only but one/only photograph
on my wall.
11
Call it a cadenza/some travelling music
off the scale
and beyond the question of who's the fairest of them all
of them all watching over me
after a or the or
neither.
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