Category: art

Now and When

The long look.

It is an act of devotion, the artist told us. To what we wondered, and she replied only looking. Which, she clarified, is of a different kind than spectating. To look long and well, as she did, was an exercise in love. She watched the neighborhood, noticed what changed. She kept the ancestors at her desk. They watched her and she looked back. They kept up a running conversation in her workspace. She watched the water, announced: it’s coming. It crept up our shores and she watched the water and watched the birds. They came and went, not unlike the visitors at her desk. She looked long and well. She was working out responses to the questions the children would ask, about how to live here now. With these, she went to the water, the ancestors, the birds. And to the other artists she knew. We need each other, I know that much, she said. We stayed with her as the water made its way.

***

Inspired by a recent  BOMB interview by Wendy S. Walters with writer Emily Raboteau.

To the Well

From the lighthouse.

––And then, an invitation. To reread certain silences in the context of a long tradition of expression among the artists whose work was protection. The practice demanded resistance of revelation, to cloak certain as-yet-unknowns in protective veils to keep them from the probing instruments and hungry hands of the doctors of discourse. Serious students of the art learn to absent themselves in certain company. Once fluent in silence, they can breach the perimeters of the well-trodden and overgrazed pastures in which they would be kept, to run wild through unsayable fields. Here is where the well of patience nurtures an impetuous and vibrant life in abiding resistance.

Why Poetry

Unsatisfying answers to an impossible and enduring question.

For the world-renewing potential of an imagined response. Because the imagination is violent in its impulse to press back against the killing from without. To tilt the scales on the side of the near erased. To disobey the given order. To honor some dimension of collective soul only glimpsed. Because a pressure accumulates. Because of this abiding anxiety. Because the capacity for making transcends those of judgement and knowing. Because joy in language, thrill in meetings. At arrivals that morph into futures. In awe over the burden of experience. To push against a form that seems to demand submission and imagine not a win but an encounter with that which sings behind the fight. Because longing is endless, and music, and unknowing so complete except for a small, insistent certainty that there is a sense around this somehow, to be near it even if I have none.

***

Notes while reading Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures.

Sound of a Sentence

At reunions.

Note the irregular pattern of the veins running to and from the mother tongue in jubilant slide of dream-substrates––to read a world through glass in fog of morning, the edge of bliss so sharp it cuts the taste of iron in the mouth––the bite of dying life to living ends, running to sudden thunder, the wicked warmth of hot irreverence, its backslap pummeling affection.

Is that you? When were we?
Are we the only two here?
Hello, friend. It is so good.
To read you again.

The Music of the Line

Poet in flight.

Always overdoing it, you rebel at limit, a mutiny barely contained by swing of body, sway of voice, as oceanic symphonies thunder from your deepest ear, to press your thumb against the troubled fold of this opening history that it might yet be smoothed transcendent. Ever the acrobat, you bear the body’s flight into the undulating net of current events in ancient time and hold it there, in the intimate round of your long lens.

Hot Mess

Heart on display.

How much I aspire to be cool and collected, contained. But this skin is too thin. She barely holds me in. Sometimes I wonder if she even tries. I think she’s up to something else sometimes, conspiring with my aching knee and the way I bleed. And bleed. And with this shaking hand. To this tentative form I might complain, why do you betray me? But while I am mostly dumb, even I can recognize the wrong in that note. Of all her acts, betrayal of my life has never been one. She’s like an excited child with something just made and far from ready to be displayed to any standards of the moment, but she doesn’t know this like she doesn’t know sleek or cool or style or mood she is tone deaf to the codes of any given art and she only wants to give me––

to give me away

like the child with construction-paper hearts, fresh cut in love and decorated with such glee that the glue hasn’t even dried yet and the glitter is falling all over the carpet, and she wants to to pair these with flowers she found on the side of the neighbor’s apartment, the ones she doesn’t know enough to call weeds––and she is so eager to give them away––

like she is eager to give me away

to anyone who is
near, like Here!
Like, Take this! It’s for you!

And I sit here, cool only when I keep her from the assembly she wants to give me to, in love––the hot, messy, extra, weedy, bleeding abundance of this embarrassing form–– knowing that as soon as we go out there she is going to try it again.

And I hear.

Creature

And creator.

It lives
by the distraction
it makes
before it dies
at the insides
only to emerge
as task: one sole
task given me
out of time.

Here I am again
afraid of running
to enact the small
body of infinite
infinitesimal
purpose given
to each, a creature
alive, scratching
for release
from suffocation
by a world yet
to know how
it breathes.

Art Walk

And historical research.

The artist told us how he carried questions as he traveled. He had worked with sound before this, but now he was into light. He was documenting dances and the history of time and space––and color, and the thing he was noticing about color is that it has a lot to say. Some called him a walking antenna. He showed us a work he had just finished. He called it Life in Rainbow. “I thought it would stop talking when I was done,” he said, “but it’s still going.” We listened. “I’m an explorer,” he explained. That sounded good to us, so we followed. Even though we had the wrong shoes and forgot to pack any food, it was a great trip.

***

Inspired by Alteronce Gumby.

What are you working on?

And why: a rough outline.

It’s an ongoing project, this who. And the question why here, which necessarily brings its entourage of related questions: where is here, what is this trajectory. Why suffer. What beauty. What truth. Remember. Forget. Give it all up. Let it bowl you over again. Try other selves. Notice other suns. Wrestle angels. Demons, too. Hear the chorus. Then the individual breaths. Notice yours among these: now it is distinct, now it blends into the others, now it is missing, now it returns. The work is no good for finishing, but at least the company is lively. What an ensemble. At the end, death calls on each of us, ready or not. Until then, this is something to do.

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