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.
In radiant remembrance.
Wolf, you have taken another pelt and I can’t bear to calculate who is the next of our missing to provide it, and now you enter the herd. But I can see the space between your first and second skins and it smells like tainted meat. How weary we are of these poisons. Muscles ache with fatigue. It won’t be long before another surrenders, too tired to keep standing in it.
And yet. Here is an artist whose medium is bombshells. He changes them by touch and attention. This one is a flowerpot, this one a vase. He makes a mobile from the casings. From one that could have killed everyone assembled, he makes a temple bell.
This is no disguise, but an undoing. Here is an invitation to the living, to hear another sound, to repurpose the old husk, to offer instead of obscure. Even to you, wolf. You can take off your cloak, unstop your ears. The bodies you left are still sounding, each a bell.
***
Inspired by the work of Tuan Andrew Nguyen, as presented in a New York Times article I read this morning. The title of this post comes from the centerpiece of an exhibition set to open at the end of the month, at New York City’s New Museum.
Considering the architecture of passage.
If, in the middle of these days, it’s time to leave,
if we consider time a mid-point, holding histories,
here is genesis, here an afterlife, and here
a map on fire.
Mineshaft, funnel, honeycombed monolith
buried in earth, nine rings of illuminated
heralds, the light blinds.
Next, a big freeze: saws, tridents, snakes.
Now the ghost-bodied eagle, the rule of
law, what recompense can follow?
Grip the talons, fingers in the sockets
of an ancient skull, soar. Hold it, this
reverence to bear other rays.
