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.

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.

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.

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.

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