Grad School: Week 13

AS THEY ARE

Maybe because the post office lady has a post office
made out of a house, she built a house that looks like
a post office. You can't say for sure why any
of the houses here look this way, though some seem
to offer their own explanations: We weren't able
to fix all of it, for instance, is common, or Later,
we changed our minds, or the comprehensive Yes
but it works, which includes both of the others,
and accounts for the cape half wrapped in plastic
against the cold of this winter day, and the four-pane
window on a slant letting in the light between
the porch roof and the eaves. What the houses might
have been or ought to look like drifts like smoke
from their chimneys up into some other world.
Here in their world they remain just as they are.

-Wesley McNair

I never thought i would live in Nebraska. Not for any reason i could ever imagine. I swore i wouldn't come here, even if i did manage to get accepted into the program. Nebraska vs.Maine. It's a hard sell but so far I am glad i made the move. I'll that i have ever wanted was to settle into a place and stay but fate conspires with no one.

The studio I have for the year is windowless, so i don't actually know i am in Nebraska while i am working. I could be in Maine, or a casino in Las Vegas. At the end of the day there is a shock leaving the building as my pupils contract at seeing the sun, my ears, nose, and lungs fill with fresh air, and i realize the true time of day, the weather, the tilt of the planet, moving around the sun.



I was going to post some pictures of what is happening in the studio, where time is measured only in clicks on the big red alarm clock. Instead, here are some pictures, taken from my wife's blog, Minnow, from out of the studio. Pictures of Nebraska. Pictures that make their way into the studio in one way or another.


The semester is drawing to a close like a freight train, of which there are many here in Lincoln. There have been a few rattle snake sighting here in eastern Nebraska, apparently, and the lore is that they hitch a ride in the empty coal cars coming in from the west. I don't know if this is true, but the tracks are close to the studio building and i imagine the trains pulling into the yard empty, save for a few rattlers in the bottom of a dusty coal car, waiting for a good chance to slither out and find a place to be just as they are.