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