who leans to listen
Above a consecrated ground still wet with our new dead, a cloud of witnesses rise, beholding. What warnings, unheeded, echo now. They turn the earth again, by sighing wind, to find the moment’s tear and mend it back to here.
Turning.
Now look what luminous
thread of water winds a knot
to mark a cycle’s sound.
In time.
Until the broken tongue in the bent form
of history’s would-be redemption unbows
from beneath the shadow of the sniper,
the nightstick, the circling drone, to find
home in a strange land and its decorated
self the stranger––
to bow again, this time before the feet
of an unwashed other, possibly unclean,
to cleanse and oil the cracked skin, to tend
and wrap the open wounds, to fester––
with anger at the noble cult that glorified
the ends that fed on broken limbs and
shattered skulls, on cages and contract
killings and called them means––
to find at the pause between tending
one and moving to the next, no fix
but flesh in its rank, ripe, hungry
wailing
needy mess, how it shakes in the
howl of a louder wind––
it will not turn,
though the turning
force insists––
the full weight
of its widening arc––
coming.
For an opening
To want the eye
that sees where
I cannot enter
to blink from
this blind
impossibility.
With Anne Truitt.
Although there was no objection to the idea of a self, hers tended to elude her. I’m curious, she said, and decided one must be here, somewhere. But where to start? Perhaps a record of everyday things. Let’s see what happens, and what happened yesterday? Last year? Does the one from today have any relation to the one from last winter?
The works, when she regarded them, stood clear and solid, each holding a space of its own. The same could not be said of the artist. Each has her preoccupations: certain colors, shapes, proportions. One day an insight comes: there is an energy you can use to endure your life, and there is a force for changing it, and these are not distinct, but drawn from the same well.
I am not so much an artist, she decides, but out of my life these objects are surfaced. It is possible, after all, to become what we have not before been able to be. I am here, she told us, to be surprised.
***
Inspired by, and with borrowed phrases from Anne Truitt’s Turn: The Journey of an Artist (1987).
