Here are some favourite passages from the book's second and third sections (of three). I find it a difficult work to excerpt from, as some of its felicity comes from longer threads and their concatenous developments.
from "The Glass Act":
He said open
and everything he painted then opened
a woman sewing
enters in infinite gradations, the white
that never gets there
remains
who, alone in a house with light,
built his house entirely of doors.
*
...--something
has slipped, is now offset, and now the street and the windows comprise a single living thing, which makes it come out in color.
*
Bonnard had a double fixation: saturated color and utter transparency. Not so much opposites as an immanent collision of the present until it's tangible. Cracked open to reveal at its center, a verb.
---
from the final section, "Glazier, Glazier":
When I was a child, I had a glass kite. Said the child staring out the window of the speeding train.
*
While in France, they built whole mansions of glass;
called orangerie or serres or vies, a conservatory can be
made, paned, claimed
I grew a lemon from a forest of thieves; I grieve
still for the infinitesimal
difference between
what you can see and what you cannot see
*
Geometry with imprecision at its heart
as the circle always veers in its infinity. Necessity.
*
Every window implies a blind spot--it's the air, the percentage of air in every scene; the portion that can't be seen lying over everything. The unveiled veil.
*
One of Bonnard's last paintings is titled The Small Window and shows, through an open window that frames three sides of the painting, another window, red, and at a distance, a suggestion of a building or maybe by now a window alone, a thriving shore.
In the UK, Cole Swensen's books are most easily found through Abe Books.
