form Archives

loose change for the shallows

toward a voice before sense

Love, try again
now with the weight of
your tomb set down.

Only air on your shoulders
this time—then water,
a constant motion.

Tonight, plant a crab in the sky,
then the archer. Notice the bull
looking back into a gazing frog.
Make them glow. The tide—dive
after these phosphorescent fish,
recklessly forgetting the rattle
of old sense, tossing it back
to these shallows, loose change
to echo your other name,
the one you knew when language
moved in shining schools between
surface and depth,
where you flashed your multitudes
through bathwater, laughing—
vessel, your eye, your mouth.

o child
the whole of you
a single sound

yes

Mechanics

Forms and function

An enfolded order has a way of highlighting the persistent presence of what many call a mess, a catch-all term to highlight the collective creation of living beings who will not submit to confinement or easy reduction.

The Body Politic

Unconscious intent

Long after ceilings are gone
there is wailing in the rubble
a direct line to sky
but walls remain
to pen the mourning
from where the veil split
over torn land, the ravaged
prize
suffocated in the taking
and then indefinite arrivals
forever mapped by absences
blast holes in our sentences
punctuated by lost words

Acts of the Flesh

Rites of passage.

This is a sacrament called undoing.
There, rank.
There, form.
There, plot.
Return.
Not the way you came.
That way is also undone.
Go where
movement will unravel, too.
To find a beginning.
It is not what you remember, not yet.

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.

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Inspired by the work of Nancy Graves.

Field of Possibility

The shape of things to come.

You seek to make art as event, not product. What happens, you wonder, when you open clay with found objects? Here is a sweater between God and your mother, and here, another mouth. Open, your hands whisper, open. Now an old bus shelter, fused glass. Look.

What is it? someone wants to know, in an unintended effort to avoid the long look, the absorption into the blobby forms that melt and lean into one another, a gathering of materials in various stages of becoming.

And what else are we, but these bubbling amoebas, opening and melting and falling endlessly into each other, in defiance of the neatly angled forms we keep meaning to hold?

***

Inspired by the work of Jessica Jackson Hutchins.