Fragments: Poets and Artists of the South and Southwest
Memphis, TN, Harrington Brown Gallery, 2011
For this collaborative show, I had the wonderful fortune of working with Taos sculptor Dean Pulver, who created A Fleeting Moment for the event. My poem “The View from Here” is a response to Dean’s sculpture.
The View from Here
Walnut propeller blades
atilt against a junkstore wall,
the lift of flight
forgotten.
A storm-tossed sloop,
what’s left of it, edges smoothed
by sand and sun, a shallow
prow among the dunes.
Wood remembers the shapes
we carve with chisel and gouge,
with V-groove and skew, the bend
of curves beneath a whetstoned knife
and beneath sandpaper—after an oilcloth
wipes the dust away—dark and light
striating like layers of water-carved
rock, like the flow of floodplain silt,
the whisper of grain against grain—
that whatever time hews,
these shapes cannot last.