Collaboration #17 Guillermo Delgado’s image, Anita Skeen responded

Guillermo Delgado’s Untitled #17, 2010, mixed media on wc paper, 6” x 12″

 
How to Keep a Notebook

I have always carried the mountain
with me:  grandmother, Crede hill,
Pedernal, Petoskey stone.

I learn how to sing
these things alive, how the vibration
of pencil on paper strikes

a chord, how that sound
can be blue, its waves
tucking over you.

Because he had no word
for blue, Homer sang the sea
wine-dark.

Inside a wine-dark shaft
in the mountain, lips
are moving:

it may take months
to form a syllable,
for a word to swim the map

of the known world.
With words I begin to map
the mountain:  dirt, pulse, snow-light.
                                       
                                 1/21/10