Distance

Tonight I want to tell you
how I’ve been talking with stones 
and dying flowers.

About resistance innate in things,
and how to revive the dying art of conversation. 

How recently I wash my shrinking hands
until they are pink and smooth 
like something newly born.

Raw as someone without a history,
as if it were easy 

to scrub clean and shed the past
in so many amnesiac layers of skin. 

Maybe this vibration in the air is the feeling 
that we all wish the world had gone a different way. 

I think about my grandfather’s lungs 
with recurring frequency these days, 

and that morning when you lay beside me 
curled on your side, breathing a gentle calm. 

How we took in the same sun-lit air 
in that instant and I was grateful
that we all still exist

even if it is at increasing intervals of distance,
and glad that, of everyone, you were closer.

Two Poems

Polyamorous (3)

1./ There was a fried shimmer 
to that August morning.

The pink sun cut through his bliss,
blinds laying shadow across our tangle.

We moved through the flaxen bloom 
of September afternoons

like petals, unfurling 
across my forehead and cheeks 

in beads of sweat. Climbing mountains,
our packs full of sweet apples we’d gnaw

then pitch spinning into the woods.
We sleep in the same language. 

        ––

2./ To say that I miss is to say that 
her hands are like warm water,

cupped, reflecting a neon flash of sky 
that marks the wind’s brief opening

in a thick canopy of trees. 
Hands that write me letters in New Orleans,

take cloudy images of hot baths, and fevered
wet limbs in darkness soft with steam.

She likes to send me love songs.
She is driving west towards me.   

      ––     

3./ When I think of you 
I think of rear view mirrors

and that day we walked together 
down rows of pearled onion heads. 

They slept like infants in damp black dirt,
not ready to be born. We left empty handed.

      ––

4./ I am lucky to have people in my life 
with this power to break my heart.

say a river

To say that a stone is
fixed, 

                say a river,

is folly. I have been given the gift 
of dreams. 

They are a dark lapping 
crusted white salt along skin,

small havens, warm 
dim, where nothing hurts. 

I wake and trees shadow on the floor. 
I did not ask them too.

Long tree shadows shake on the floor 
and there is nothing I can do
about the sun hung low and slanting
   My face is illuminated

these days
it is a gift

                   this fading season

                   this moving water

I have been given
say, a river. 

                  My body curves to embrace large stones,  

                  lozenges impermanent,

                  Say there is nothing: 

nothing fixed. 
No caress is fixed.

Dark water laps the salt on my skin. 
Dark tree shadows shimmer the floor.

The sun quits the sky
I have been given,

say, a river.

Critical Writing

For the past 5 months I’ve been the part-time Gallery Assistant at photo-eye Gallery in Santa Fe, NM. Along with getting to work with excellent contemporary photographers like Christopher Colville and Reuben Wu, my favorite part of the job has been contributing to the photo-eye Blog. While my poetry practice has always been interwoven with my visual art, academic and critical writing have had their own place in my professional life. I’d like to use this space to share some of that writing as it’s place in my daily life expands.

The following is a piece I wrote about Terri Weifenbach’s photography for photo-eye’s blog. I immediately felt a kinship with her work upon being introduced to it, as much of my recent sculpture has been using cut flowers and obscuring the viewer’s perception of them as static objects. In a similar way, Weifenbach’s photography creates a shift in how the viewer perceives the world temporally, and physically. A link to her work on photo-eye Gallery’s website is included below:

Spring is currently flourishing in northern New Mexico. The high desert is teeming with flowering cacti, wild grasses, and lush green pine forests. The earth feels alive in this season. For me, being outside in this fresh, colorful atmosphere reflects what it might be like to step inside a Terri Weifenbach photograph.

I have recently had the pleasure of re-visiting photo-eye Gallery’s physical archive of Weifenbach’s work. Using color film to make lustrous C-Prints, Weifenbach photographs plants, gardens, and landscapes to create dreamy, saturated fields of bright hue and texture. The spaces that she captures in her work are verdant, immersive, slightly blurred with selective focus. Viewing her photographs feels as though one were walking through a dream, lush and expansive.

The most impressive part of the work is Weifenbach’s ability to capture clarity and haze simultaneously in each image. Her use of selective focus shortens the depth of field in her images to help the viewer feel as though they are directly inside the photograph. A slight blurring of foreground or periphery imitates the sensation of turning one’s head to take in the full wonder of a new space, or the movement of branches and petals shimmering in the wind. The fact that this complex composition and portrayal of space is all done in camera makes its effectiveness even more impressive.

In XXII/38 Snake Eyes/Lana Weifenbach captures the delicate bodies of two periwinkle butterflies fluttering in a flowering bush. The branches and blossoms closest to the viewer are out of focus, hovering in midair like phantoms. These blurred orbs seem to press forward, almost out of the picture plane. It’s the middle ground of the photograph that is in perfect focus, drawing the viewer’s attention to the back side of the plant where the gentle blue butterflies dreamily pollinate bursts of fuchsia blossoms. It’s almost as if Weifenbach is giving us x-ray vision through the plant, or forcing us to imagine peering through the branches and leaves to witness this one tender moment.

Losing oneself in the palpable fecundity of Weifenbach’s work is a true pleasure. Whether her photographs feature wild plants in a landscape, flowers in a garden, or a tree in someone’s yard, she brings her viewers directly into contact with wonderful visual sensations. Each photograph offers an up-close and personal experience with nature and opens a dialogue about our human relationship with the world around us.

The original post on photo eye’s blog can be found here: http://blog.photoeye.com/2019/06/from-flat-files-terri-weifenbachs-xxii38.html

a daisy turning its face to the east

For a few weeks now I’ve been creating work with fresh cut flowers in the studio (along with pinecones and wintery things I find on walks). While the winter in Santa Fe is beautiful, it is cold. Something about the colors here, even in February, (pink and green pastel sunsets, baby blue noon skies, the bright bristle of a fir tree limb heavy with snow, soft orange earth) make me long for the warmth of spring. For me in this season, the dormancy and folding inward that comes with winter seems like a period of deceptive external stillness, while so much is happening, growing, waiting to burst forth internally. And so, in anticipation of the activity and germinative nature of springtime, I’ve been drawn to the soft, open faces of flowers, and a colorful palate. A gentle contrast to the sharpness of ice and snow.

With this work, I’ve been revisiting two poems written back in the summer of 2016 during a time of a just-begun awakening— a thawing out— and large shifts in who and what I held space for in my life. This turning backward/inward is not only for mining the language and imagery I used, but I’d like to draw a line from there to here in order to observe the growth in my life (in heart and mind alike) since that time. Now, the sensation of love feels like a daisy blooming in my torso. My current state of openness toward that sweet, specific, vulnerable way, seems to be pouring out of me and into my work, making these poems seem distant. Where these poems are still full of the fear, grief, and dissipating numbness I carried, the new sculptures feel full of hope and abundance and signal a space for looking forward.

Though perhaps a bit maudlin, these poems were, nonetheless, an important step in my expansion into a more true-self. They mark a springtime of the soul. They are not polished, and there is a good deal of language-play at work, which I always find challenging, enjoyable, and useful.

Glacier

Glacier/ erasure

There is no such thing as

still

no
such a thing as paramount
Stillness.

Even glaciers creep.
And shrink
and shriek.

The stars spread outward
light

Dissipates
the dissolving horizon
like the heaving back of some beast

a blur at the edge of twilight
thawed
snake in the grass

Peripheral silence
Disturbed by a flaw in gravity
an animal instinct

skins sliding in the dark

seismic heat

___________________________
Asunder

Abyss / A bliss

Your lip and teeth.
A daisy turning its face to the east.

A shapely name:

Flower

  Founder  Flounder

Surrender

Show me your lines
your sinew, all angles
an arrow

My limbs are  
a parting

Open the floodgates
the salt mines

cave of wonder

Those things I inherited from my mother
before me

a white sheet
a blank space
a static
downward spiral

The curve of your neck
spelled in sleep

I sink

on beginnings and recent reflections from Santa Fe

I’ve always been comfortable with beginnings. The Aries in me (sun/moon/mercury) relishes the thrill and challenge of charging head first into new ventures, landscapes, ideas. However, after recently discovering the writing of Clarice Lispector, I’ve been thinking frequently about how things may be more cyclical than I used to imagine. The idea of infinity, something with no beginning and no end, things that circumambulate spacetime to be revisited, returned to, remembered. Even according to Plato/Socrates, humans beings, ephemeral and thoroughly un-infinite in corporeal form as we are, do not learn completely new information, but recall things from some vast collective-unconscious supply of knowledge and lives previously lived. What a lovely thought, to be always connected to the whole enormity of human history and the universe, consciously or unconsciously, through innate recollection.

And so I begin (or continue, as it were) to make more space for words and language in my creative practice. I’ve written poetry and prose things since I was a little girl, and continued honing those skills into high school, more seriously through college, and finally they have stayed with me as an adult, although more as behind-the-scenes support for my studio explorations. I find the fecundity of written expression to be a necessity, working in tandem with/running parallel to my visual art, like essential roots from the deepest parts of my brain feeding my other outlets of creativity.

While this is not the start of a written practice for me, it is the first time since my youth I’ve given this particular part of my heart a public platform, a space for openly sharing myself with words instead of visual images/objects/environments. Indeed this blog is more of a return, than a true beginning, though it feels much like a shift in method… a fresh start and rediscovery of how to put my writing out in the world. Here, I hope to document those moments in which, like being simultaneously adrift in unbridled rumination and caught up in the vivid edges of the present instant, I am stretched wide in the grey area of perception, collective remembrance, and the conception of ideas, and in which, playing with the elasticity of language, the pliability of memory, and the jovial-melancholic range of the human experience, I write.

In the spirit of the murkiness of beginning/continuation/return, I’ll find a place to start with a recent poem, extracted from reflections on hiking near Santa Fe, NM a few days after heavy snow.

Snow is melting on the pines.
Drops of water
a webbing constellation

bright weight, a swoon
of bristling evergreen fingers.

Iridescent

heavy foot, leaking eye
a drag in the snow,
I am blood, frantic

and trapped in the feedback loop
of limbs and torso.

I grow fond of cold these days.
When folding in on myself
like a singularity

When the cooling embers
between us still glow warm.

My breath hangs in the air.
Little clouds that say, I am

Not a question

I make weather.

despite the beat of my heart
despite my density,
cumbersome gait

I evaporate

shifting smoke screen
Apparition.

Alone in the sharp of winter
my churning heat is a hard fact

I am luminous
corporeal

wind stings my eyes
water

little stars slide down my cheek
and steam

Iridescent

Open throat and burning lung
I am

A smile, absolute and ephemeral parenthesis
I am

an entrance
enter exit
a beginning and end,

tantamount unwitnessed

like    and

  (un)

and   sure

as anything
that congeals and dissipates

- written January, 2019