Conjuration.

Gilfillan, Mouth of the Frenchman Fork, 2000

… [T]he function of landscape conjuration changes continually, and the simple Going-out can become a reclamation of the One Day Only and an affirmation/authentication of latitude/longitude, 
a bestowal of color and protein-level relations.

The poet looking comprises an intellectual sizing, weighing. And if the writing holds, it can function by its very nature as both a 
naming and a reclaiming, a corrective and a salvaging, within the 
occupying (preoccupying) culture.

Horses in loose gangs, hillsides netted, laced, fretted with dark pines, the foreground beach-bright sunlit ochre sand, the distance stark blue-black cloud and shelf shadow. Two shiny white gumbo-ruts of a snaking road lower left to upper right, would-be day to would-be night . . .

All day — artists and their surroundings: a mediation and a bartering. And, maybe, even, one of the ultimate human stakes: “Never mortify your landscape.”

(Sursum corda.)

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