Rusty Morrison

BOOK OF THE GIVEN

Scenes within the seeing

I was ready for rain, but this morning's cloudlessness is entirely blue in answer. And you are quick to converse in cerulean. I have no reply. Sky, I would say. But would this be abeyance? Simply biding my time. Such an elemental shift must wear its own wings. Anise swallowtail, fluttering now, on the otherwise subject-less slope. Approach and it offers the precision of vanishment that I see daily in your face, in my own. What are you thinking? I ask. My thoughts woven of the same event as yours, but with photons forming atoms into an entirely different cloth. Squint, when a brilliant morning vestments us both. The shock is a kind of smile.

***

Versions of the seen

I am drawing your face from memory. Leaving space for the stones I've not classified, will not find. Granite striates the outcroppings at Half Dome, this is a decade past. Pillow basalt along the Coast Range of Jenner; where either of us might have been the one falling, while the other called it future, throwing pebbles. You are facing the violence of gesture that I record in absolutely motionless gravel, which is fine-grained and extrusive, and into which you will not be drawn. Every style of line I amass must be valued, or the reproduction will disappear. We call that embedding. Layers of bedded lava are glassy, almost translucent, due to rapid cooling, forced to the surface. This shard of rhyolite, milk-white with pink overtones, this flattery, and the negative space in which flattery fails. Everything plays a part. Every fissure I draw, filled only with smoke, is the survival of some missed attention looking back emptily at the viewer.