transformation Archives

as though another world

whispers at the pressure points

The ever-present door announces itself in heavy traffic, a portal thrumming its private gravity. Brake lights bloom a red procession, hearts drum another time, to feel what stirs beneath these sheets of asphalt riverbed, muscling out of hibernation.

Some say a black star can drink whole worlds from miles away— a terror, until the thought turns inside-out and the void becomes a turning point, its axis hidden between one state and the next. Old icons taught endurance, bright wounds, the lift of leaving.

Danger is expected here. A greater peril looms, by devotion to denial of an elsewhere, in those who swear allegiance to a knotted net, its stinking mesh, even as something ancient and unseen exhales a boggy breath to press against these seams.

Lover’s Prayer

The art of doing nothing

In the silence of satisfied (although perhaps guarded) anticipation of victorious arrival, one spoke. Wait, said the one. Let us be sure that we know what we are doing. Many laughed.

In the deepest dark, a body will not recognize its own fall. This is protective. Who wants to know when they are downer than they seem? What follows is total upheaval. An eye opens.

Cloudfaces

Metamorphoses

It may have been that fearful hope, moved by agony, that caused a slippage of the faces we had taken for protection, flimsy as they were. Then we became something cloudlike, breathing, and the sound of us was music. The music of us was made of what we had known in the time before we knew faces. We could hear much when we were nothing and no one.

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.

***

Inspired by the work of Nancy Graves.

Unburied Sounds

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.

Soul at Night

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.