Blog

Calculating Risks

Proceedings, with caution.

If tortoise asks eagle for flying lessons and man for the word––and once given, wants fire. If the seed begs for better ground, let it hear the bird warning smoke. If the wolf takes the sickbed in costume to hide its want, if the girl takes the stranger for familiar. If the bull. If the labyrinth. If the thread. Run.

Trickster Rituals

Possibilities for movement.

Something that is was just here. It has significance but will not fit any storyline. There was a grotesque beauty reveling. And then, and then. Every soul has its way of coming to terms with its containment in space, contending with death. It crowds the psyche, back against a wall. It has no end, and isn’t going anyplace. It’s always going on. And then, and still. Unlike the notion of story­­––something that, as they say, happened. The order of movements is crucial.

The Proximity of Matter

With Cynthia Hawkins.

Changing spaces between us, we kept looking. 

Form. Color. Line. Body, body, us.

We were skeptical when you confessed.

My practice is abstraction, you said.

We thought you should not say that out loud.

But you persisted. Draw a tree long enough,

you said, it will evolve. Until what you have

are lines, white space, and the pulse of intersections.

The point was not less tree, but more.

Not the sum of its parts, but something beyond.

In the beginning, you think it’s about figures.

But stay with it, and you see. What matters

is movement. What matters is direction.

What matters is space.

We wondered which space. 

Between the canvas and the eye, you said,

where they float. 

We wondered which they.

***

Inspired by (and using borrowed phrases from) this interview with Cynthia Hawkins. The title comes from one of Hawkins’ series.

One Hope

For what may shine.

That you may one day know a lens not terror, a posture not crouched, sounds neither siren nor drone, and weathers unrhymed with death count. Food to offer, not to reap, and time as a ladle to be passed to the tune of Here, take it. Take what you need. Did you get enough? when no host will rest until everyone is so full that they lose the count, numbers blurring back into beginning, and no one thinks to save the light for when it leaves us.

Peel

Becoming the placeholder.

Once, I misplaced the breaks in my heart. That was a day without paint.

These skins resound a rhythm just below the ear’s reach, so look. 

See that ghosting flicker, call it urgency. History. The edge of before.

Call it, cipher. 

What is the word for this want?

Only wrong answers can help me now. 

***

Inspired by the work of Oscar yi Hou. 

Marsh Ruins

Decay as creative premise.

Nested in cordgrass, a master work sinks. 

The artist smiles over its cracking disappearance.

Rubble is one of my primary interests, she tells us.

She imagines its rearrangement.

I mean, she adds, what might come?

There are good reasons, after all,

––and especially here, to reject nostalgia. 

***

The title of this post comes from this installation by American artist Beverly Buchanan, which a recent New York Times article by Siddhartha Mitter describes as a vanishing masterpiece.