Presence
(Presence by Mary Frank, a bronze sculpture with blue patina, is housed now in the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration.)
I. The terra cotta
women
after
Mary Frank’s sculptures
I
want to make. . . ____________________ ____________________ ____________________
a
woman in her solitude
will
cup and lift a breast: it is
a
negligent gesture, a human
gravity
to
make. . .
a
woman will wake, rocking,
to
the womb’s throb, wake
to
concavity,
time’s
hermetic cup
I want to make. . .
to the
syntax of the wrist,
to lift
and
quickened longing.
We take up brushes
when our need is for a thickness like ourselves:
essential
oils,
the
many salts; one way
to
keep the light inside this world.
But when we come to clays, it’s for the commonness
and fossils,
the
muscles
of their hardening, the tastes
of their very names:
for
terra cotta, porcelain, raku;
for
the palate’s changing pressure
on
the consonant and vowel;
for clay itself:
laid flat on the farmer’s tongue at dinner;
risen clear as cobble
to
the cantering horsewoman’s ears;
kindling
the ancient cadence
in
the fire-and-brimstone preacher:
Clay.
We were clay, first,
and
He took us up. . . .
I want to make. . .
in leaves. Fossil lines
traverse
their flesh.
Women,
these,
of
torn edges, abrupt breaks,
hinges.
Women seasoned by earth’s long stride,
inhabited by snakes
and
birds,
their
creases labial,
their layers draped and leavened,
lapped and caved
upon
themselves.
Women,
too,
of continuance,
wanting still to be wet, with leaves inside them;
wanting,
as well, to be air
reaching
into elongation;
from there to the lift and loss
of dust.
I want to make. . .
ourselves.
This, the first of the long hungers.
There are others.
begin with the hunger to begin:
clay, to begin –
begin
with little,
enough to brim
the cup of your pressed palms.
press,
and
place the wafer of it cold
on
your tongue.
taste the many earths –
the basic salts and chromes,
burnt carbons, iron oxides,
human
sweat,
the bloods and bones
of bird and mammal young,
their
beaks and horns and teeth,
the skulls of elders
buried in various skins and furs,
the
bitter tang of droppings,
the
leavings of earlier hungers –
seeds
and lime.
taste, too, the spaces –
the
emptied basins of myriad grits,
indentations
and the air therein,
the
calligraphic hollows where
small
shells
or
spines have lain.
and
last,
the aftertastes –
of lightning, wood-ash, turf,
the
vast relentless rains
of
stars and particles.
always, it has been a base
and savory earth.
color, next:
to sate this hunger, first, erase.
return to rarity – to blue.
oh,
the sky back then,
the
wet gemstone, the white
spring
hill;
the
cornflower
and
the wild rose;
the
oiled birds glistening after snow –
and
oh,
the
deep shades of bark
and
of burn;
the
many-muscled furs,
the browns and blacks, resplendent golds;
and
all along,
the breaking down of weed and herb
to rot and stain;
to
pigment, then,
and
the first dyes drawn from the vegetable source
and
seen,
separate,
uncontained –
color
alone.
then, slowly learned and slowly taught, the art
of the long dyes.
vermilion,
emerald, violet,
the
way flesh lit with the drape of it,
the
ways the human form
could
move,
adorned.
oh, the colors that were, before colors turned
to
Barbiedoll pink, to awning green,
turned
garish and hot,
turned
glow-in-the-dark –
oh,
the dark.
and space: ____________________
a craving, a clenched longing
beyond naming,
as
if shoulders could ache
with
the lost weight of sky.
reach become a paltry thing;
our
elbows, an embarrassment;
we
watch our feet.
but, here,
in the throat’s hollow
where
we have embalmed gasp,
here,
we recall
space:
how
once,
we filled our cells on the long light of distance
falling away into layer and lap,
we
fed
on
cliff and sky,
on starlight
(stardark),
on the
distant linger or lift of birds,
the companionable
passing of beasts, unseen;
we fed
on the
uncontained.
and last, the need to deepen:
like
the hunger of a river to channel, bed, and mouth; or
the
hunger of the tongues of bells to carve their troughs in air; or
the
hunger of shadows to burn the sundial stone.
the hunger of a lover for the deepening of love –
if
only by a little,
the hunger to carve, by simply passing here,
a proper depth
for
human passing,
for
the bearing of a faith through the rock of a life.
this, the last of the hungers of clay:
by a little and a little,
the
deepening of the heart.
A terra cotta woman
lies
in leaf and fossil light.
One hand lifts a breast,
her fingers,
like
the ridges of the oldest ranges,
splayed
upon it.
Her
eyes
have
turned away into
a
disconnect of such vast measure,
only
her spine resists
a
primal separation.
A woman prepared by earth and fire
to
lie
through
winter’s long erasure of the heart.
All winter, she cups and lifts a breast
like an anguish, like a chalice;
all
winter, she arches
the
muscles of her throat,
strains
to raise her face beyond the possible, to speak –
a face
already
so opened
she
is past her voices.
I want to make. . .