I stopped sculping after my Everest of a nose. Many wonderings of my ‘Is’ or ‘MEs’ smutch words, not clay. Plying visitors with questions flowing out of prior questions. Fragile explorations of the ball of yarn tangle of fallback thoughts and feelings. Fracking the mind’s wheelhouse patterns before they harden . . .
Read more “Nose Left Profile”
After an epic retrospective of Giacometti’s work at MOMA, I bought self-hardening clay.
This first—and last—bust mushed thin sixty plus years ago, fixated, like the master sculptor,
on the nose. The shadow dance of green dents record in aged color, the passion and passivity eroding the lava of my years. All first sculptures being self- portraits—it’s said—what was
graceful and flowing on whatever shelf-stage you fling yourselves, perpetually arcing, perhaps to strains of Appalachian Spring, the dance Aaron Copeland wrote for his friend, Martha Graham. “Many can write a three-minute song like ’tis a gift to be simple,” Copeland said, “but art extends music like a butterfly makes a garden into a symphony—letting it leap from ear to heart.”
Read more “Pewter Dancers-iMac”
Music is spirit in-chant. Syncopated by silence. Ethers heard by inner ears like Beethoven’s—angelic, intergalactic gamboling. Wese’s lingering melodies bowed on her now cracked violin—
the gaiety she recanted in college to play second fiddle to a dour husband. Appalachian
dulcimer droning may curl down along-side haunting Lakota flute-song. A lyric décor
for never-before-attempted-modulations improvised by heartsick visitors. Guard figurines
of this domain of broken strings, were once pillars on an African Chief’s throne.
Denuded by sandblasts and sun, pockmarked ancient reef with gull-caw memory, sluiced from pre-historic sea. Elkhorn limestone sculpted by undercurrents’ flow—pitched high and dry—you testify life hides and thrives in ink-black hollows from which we arose eons ago.
Read more “Surf-tumbled Torso”
from the Indo Pacific, beached near a poetic festival of white daffodils, spiral away our daily hugs of what’s negative. Fan the alabaster purity of inner fire white hot, like
the earth’s belly! Shine one of your leis atop the fragile awareness centers of our spine. Burnish our skin’s historical/alchemical sensors. Twist intentions and actions with pliable white radiance that masks all colors in plain sight and poultices the unknown we fear.
broken from Key West’s dead reef, razor-sharp. Asymmetrical proof of the watery ancestral playground of our birth. Yearly, I bleach you free of daily confusion’s smudge,
as you shift position along my tidal poetry shelf. Rawboned you filter serpentine self -fantasies presented in person or digitally. We existentialists learn early to make parallel notes: thoughts of the witness dispensed judiciously on one side, juxtaposed to postures statements, gestures, dreams on the other. We follow your model coral—transparent, porous witness to calcifying flash-backs and flash-forwards in psycho-spiritual deliberations. Whatever grows in this liminal space, we’d wish to be nutritious—clear
of pollutants— where the colorful and playful may find relief.
Mottled cream wax candlestick—your muted LED flickers make ordinary artifact holy. Halos and hiccups of chiaroscuro weave an interactive spume over numinous mementos. Overtones and undertones of history and wish pinball off each other. Meanings rupture. Morph. Dimly lit relics mellow into wordless wisdom.
Read more “Ode to a green band”
hollow-eyed/earthtorn/seatossed leviathan, how many ancient questions you strew
across this sacred shelf. Blue-green Caribbean chaos sculpted your stump. Elemental tides—scrubbed, smoothed and burnished your grain, sun-whitening it. In your jaw
is a ritual arrow I clenched in mine tom-toming my way into manhood. The red-ribboned eagle bone whistle I blew sundancing to a bison head pole—to summon
the Great Spirit in the Crazy Mountains of Montana. Forgive me coral-fan bareback rider, I scubaed you illegally off a reef near Cozumel.
Ten generations of Peruvian
Thumbs smoothed Christ
into a silvery woman
converting this old crucifix
into a mariafix. Hail Mary’s
of devout peasants whorled