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Bread

And the heart of the matter.

They come to see us, hungry for our size.

Look at our faces. We tower. They dance.

One says, walk slower. One says, closer.

There are more of us now, as though prayers.

Into clouds. No command is needed from this height.

They sing us. A dirge, they sing for beloveds

and the birds call back. From their ovens,

the smell of bread. When they taste,

they will look. Up, they will see us,

our suspended faces

against sky. 

***

Inspired by a recent New York Times article about Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater.

The Land Before Us

Facing its faces.

The land before us

suggested as much 

by gesture as by intensity

of gaze returned.

It was tempting 

to call out, Hello?

and Who is here?

But we saw them

seeing us and

the grasses

spoke first. 

***

Inspired by Osman Can Yerbaken’s description of the paintings of Ghanaian artist Gideon Appah, who as Yerbaken puts it, “commands the landscape genre as its own form of portraiture by depicting the emotionality of a place like the piercing immediacy of a face.” 

Last Stand

On sacred ground.

We wondered too late if there was any other place to go, dry winds making rubble of our throats, their silence to echo the ruin we could not bear to see when it was yesterday and still only possible when other states were also possible and still, we will not say it, how we want the rain, as though to say nothing is to trick it back, as though language itself were only a game, no longer trusted to sing us forward, to call the heavens down and return the waters of our lives to our waiting tongues as we hide them in shame and will not say the word and it is true there has been a betrayal here for the word, too, can be trampled under feet too quick to march, who would not stop to meet the ground when it introduced itself, and asked to touch the naked soles

––of us.

You Are Here

Trying to read the map.

Some of the old masters believed the ear outlived the heart, so they would sit with the dead forty days, giving directions. We didn’t expect that kind of treatment, given the times. We thought we had better get to where we knew the map. 

We weren’t sure what to make of the artist’s work, so asked. There is something unknown in you, she said. She wanted us to see it. We asked her if she was sure about that and she laughed, shaking her head. We did not always know how to talk to the artist. 

In one series, she created shapes from mathematical theorems, but we took them for angels. The effect was like walking in a cathedral. We wanted to know how she did it. Something happens, she said. But when I work, I do not think of things.

I wish you could see it, and we asked what. How the void is the place where you stand, she said, and left us. We are still here, looking. 

***

Inspired by the work of Dorothea Rockburne.

Blank Space

And nobody’s wind.

It was the last evening of the break, and it was nothing.

How I loved it, remembering now. 

The walks we took back and again to the car, checking

on things we forgot, returning empty-handed to share

our mutterings with the cat and laughter over

your particular socks and your ice cream

and the way you pretended not to sleep

and the show we watched was stupid

and we kept on repeating its lines

laugh-crying over nothing and I didn’t even write

a page, only opened a file and closed it

I could feel the time closing for this and now wonder

if it’s what’s left undone in a place that sanctifies. 

I will miss this, the lack of pretense

that we were anything but here

breathing in it.

What This Is

All but fire, a natural history.

Then came the question of fire, its striking immediacy. It had to do with all that changes suddenly, but we were there to describe what was. A separate matter. It was decided. 

When it came to outlining the real, we would omit this strange incandescence––unnatural, wasn’t it? ––to better focus on the unburning parts.  Research hummed along after that, with machine-like efficiency, without distraction by the looping songs of grieving souls.  

What is this? We would say, of each non-burning specimen. And where there was no name, we could invent one, and all of it fell under a single decision, and it was Progress and we went with it, marching.

Variabilities

Of similar forms.

Considering the history of a given set of bodies, the artist posed a question. Where are the bones of the bones? she asked us, and we knew our nakedness an extension of a larger shadow, casting us out. Once in it, we danced something more than imitation. The camel’s eye our needle, we stitched our skeletons into new visions of before to scatter our tomorrows until we lost their tracks and had to make them new again. 

***

Inspired by the work of Nancy Graves.