from The Open Window
Photography replaced the river, which, due to unexpected comp-
lications, resulted in the Great Age of the Train. Bonnard started
photographing just as the snapshot became possible. Glass negatives
gave way to strips of film, and the river froze, intact. In shadow and
light, the Seine, said Marthe, standing in the garden, frame after
frame. We are multiplying the things we can and do see through.
from Glazier, Glazier
Glass is not a liquid, but a non-crystalline rigid, and the window made
its first appearance in Rome around the year 100, where reviewers
said, “of poor optical quality,” yet those who wanted fissured
sight were living twice and lifted. When I was a child, I had a glass
kite. Said the child staring out the window of the speeding train.
from Five Landscapes
One
This is an outline for a project on the relationship between landscape and time,
the latter turning physical, equivocal, equal. I'm on a train.
The whole window and speed, vertile, vertige. It will be
an expository piece and not an evocation. Look down there
in the field, a hundred people, a festival, a lake, a summer, a hundred
thousand fields, all your versions, a woman places her hand
on the small of a man's back in the middle of the crowd and leaves it.
Two
A wedding in a field-the old saying: it's good luck to be seen
from a train dressed in white, you must be looking the other way, so many things work
only if you're looking away. A woman in a field is walking away.
Gardens early in the evening. Trees
planted a few hundred years ago to line a road no longer there
.
The water is pale teal, light, field after field. Spire, steeple, sea
of trees that line roads long disappeared along with their houses, which were
great houses in their time.
