A few things that gathered near the shores of my mind between bird-prints, migrations, Pat Steir’s ‘fear maps", and the terror cartographies of the invisible present.

Starting with salted tail feathers and idioms, as poemed by Albert Goldbarth in four stanzas that query what it means to be stationed.

“STATIONED”, a poem by Albert Goldbarth

It's the other ones, who soon enough return
to being happy after the funeral, that are nearest
to their own deaths—in their gaiety
and everyday distraction, they're so open

and unguarded . . . anything could enter them;
could claim them. It's the ones who weep
incessantly that are saved for now, the ones
who have taken a little of it

into their systems: this is how
inoculation works. And sorrow is difficult,
a job: it requires time to complete.
And the tears?—the salt

of the folk saying,
that gets sprinkled over the tail feathers
and keeps a bird from flying;
keeps it stationed in this world.

To be kept inside the salt // of the folk saying, and Goldbarth’s marvelous enjambments, in the unguarded openness that a map forestalls. For nothing could be worse than getting lost in the land that is fear, located in each mind, differently distributed. Enter this series of fear maps by Pat Steir, or a few that caught my eye.

Here is Pat Steir’s Fear Map III (1971)— inscribed in pencil throughout drawing: "Strangespace"; "Dog"; "Back"; "Line". Steir uses all caps for these words.

Why the dog?

To rephrase the question: if maps are orienting devices, then does the naming serve to acknowledge the threatening creature without recognizing it? Fear is always about a particular mental relationship which may or may not be conscious. Like the part of Shawnie Morris’ poem, “Clothespins on the Line”, where clothespins are rendered better than birds because they ‘excrete’ nothing. Clothespins waste nothing.

But here is a different part of the same poem—- “Clothespins on the Line”:

I love how Morris lets the words separate, break apart, letters drifting away from each other like the “it” in the parentheses, calling the mind to consider how an apostrophe may be tucked into a parentheses, or bracketed, or italicized, and what it means to apostrophize the closed space of the mind.

Pat Steir’s Fear Map IV (1971), with “Empty” inscribed near a set; “Fear” at the bottom, along a red line.

The black box is so eminently fear-full, so full of its own dark enclosure.

The first stanza of May Sarton’s poem, “A Parrot”, with that reversal sharpening the incline into the next stanza:

My parrot is emerald green,
His tail feathers, marine.
He bears an orange half-moon
Over his ivory beak.
He must be believed to be seen,
This bird from a Rousseau wood.
When the urge is on him to speak,
He becomes too true to be good.

And the whitening urges and contrasts of Pat Steir’s "Fear Map V" (1971)— composed with graphite, colored pencils, pastel, watercolor, and pink and black ink on paper. Inscribed in pencil in lower center of recto: "Fear Map V"; in upper left in pencil: "Fear More Happy".

The use of superlatives in this fear map: more happy. And that tiny patch in the bottom left corner that resembles a ghosted sun barge by Twombly.

I keep thinking of how cirrus means ‘curl’ in any cloudscape, and how Steir’s use of white clouds without evoking clouds here, which may be one of the signature markings of an erasure, namely, the cloudedness that cannot be condensed into clouds, the beclouding without condensation.

*

A mixture of fear and feathers in this poem titled “Tail Feathers” (that I saved on my phone and which remains unattributed because I can’t find it by searching online) — and which opens so exquisitely . . . I arrived by rain.

Orientation for birds is accomplished by tail feathers. Usually, birds have six pairs of feathers on the tail, with each pair displaying increasing levels of asymmetry towards the outer pair, all of which are arranged in a fan shape that supports precision steering in flight. In some birds like the peacock, tail feathers have evolved into showy ornaments that are useless in flight.

Moist.
Like flames.

The tension in that implausible and totally possible image that evokes the world of school, disabling the tail feathers from accomplishing their purpose. All means of escape are ornamental in the classroom or the school corridor. The game is rotten, to mischaracterize a quote from a Concrete Blonde cover of a Leonard Cohen song. The board limits the choices that can be made. On that note, Cezanne had multiple peach-heaps that could be hiding the skull, this Still life: Assiette de pêches among them.

Keeping It Simple

by Mary Ruefle

I take the bird on the woodpile,
separate it from its function, feather
by feather. I blow up its scale.
I make a whole life out of it:
everywhere I am, its sense of loitering
lights on my shoulder.

This poem is from Mary Ruefle’s collection memling’s veil (University of Alabama Press, 1982), which happens to be the first poetry book I owned by Ruefle, and perhaps this book predisposed me to think of her as an ekphrastic poet, or one that writes in dialogue with images. I always wonder what art or illustration Mary Ruefle is studying as the poem comes together. She reminds me of Samuel Beckett in this way; or else, my suspicion that an image is being assimilated into the language. There is a magic in that—- a magic, too, in Pat Steir’s More Magical Fear Map - Map VI (1971). A mage, perhaps?

**Pat Steir. *More Magical Fear Map - Map VI* (1971)**

Mage or not, this 'more magical’ map wants arcades and tunnels somehow, and for some reason, the shape of the human-like figures linked up with a few lines by Dino Buzatti in the incredible collection of short stories, The Bewitched Bourgeois, translated by Lawrence Venuti and coming out from NYRB Classis in January 2025:

Contrary to what you supposed, we—l repeat—are happy. Happy! Happy! Drowning in an ocean of bliss! The curse that divides me! Hell! Working hard and finding oneself always with hands full of ashes. Going mad for a woman, and when you've possessed her, feeling like an empty worm. Fighting for glory, for money, for whatever demon happens to possess me, and when I've reached it, a black shadow awaits me, and all this only to die. Even marvelous vices, even poetry, even music are converted into putrefaction and poison and this is one of the fortunate talking to you, one of the very fortunate, because for the most part the others are also condemned to illness, poverty, physical hardship, stink, ugliness, vulgarity, and they too must leave even if they forget they must leave, for them too the shadow waits in the corner, behind the door, inside the wardrobe, along with nocturnal anguish and anguish in the morning, which is even worse.

The morning-after anguish is the worst. The morning after anguish is worsted from its superlatives.

[If you know who wrote “Tail Feathers”, please find me on twitter or bluesky or ruffle my feathers so that I can give this poet the credit they deserve for this marvelous poem!]