To A Fellow Visitor
who walks the same pace I do,
isn’t it funny how we’ve gathered here today
to wander alone?
I’ve come here (alone) to feel my aloneness.
To praise my solitude in the presence
of Apollo
sculpted from marble, the consecrated
form we remember before
the words
that first gave him his existence.
I come here in search of my origin
for what utterances of love and beauty
brought me here
because I find myself only loving
gods made of stone these days.
How difficult it is
to admire flesh,
flawed and unreliable.
When statues are always
here, in these rooms,
waiting for our gaze.
Do you see these matters the way I do?
As you walk beside me,
a stranger, who wonders at her aloneness.
Do you wonder why I am alone?
I question yours.
Yet, we stay silent, pondering
a representation of our being.
Do you also wish the answer to our beginnings
was that simple—a block of marble?
Frank Lloyd Wright Skates Down the Guggenheim
Black concrete cascades down a hill, pressed against a dark sky
yellow lights illuminate the green of the palm trees,
and the wall at the end of the street. The wall is light pink;
it is all that he sees, staring from the top.
The spiraling road feels invisible, and he feels invincible.
Looking down, he imagines that when he releases his hands from the board,
extends his legs upwards, and sits his butt back in a half-squat over
the small pair of wheels supporting his weight,
he is spiraling down the curves of the Guggenheim.
He sees himself imagined as Frank Lloyd Wright,
every round he makes, another floor of art. He skates
like the easy stroke of Kandinsky’s paintbrush,
even when he scrapes his knees, no artist
can make red like he can. Not even Soutine dripping meat.
But he only ever rides on flat surfaces. Parking-lots.
The sidewalks, the ones with no cracks.
In his head, he has skated down staircases and skidded
across the railings, burning the wood on the bottom of his board.
His friends start to wonder why he hasn’t moved.
Haven’t you done this before?
He has. He says I have. So why
does he wonder how to stop, before he gets to the pink wall
and stains it with something a bit darker in shade. If he slams
His leg into the pavement, will the color be the same
As the walls of The Night Cafe?
These are things only the artist thinks through, he tells himself.
So he stays contemplating descent. Knowing,
I am a skater.
A Noble Material
Believing myself a spirit-filled tabernacle holding
inside potential architectures, unsuspecting of myself
being under construction, I set out on building a grand
cathedral so I would not die.
Once, I listened to women kneeling at pews sing
about God needing a space to fill because God
has no body. Iron being the only material I could afford,
I started on the underlying framework. Cramps
in the upper walls and tribunes, I attach with praise
from the song of my clanging hammer. I aspire
to bend this iron into spire ornaments, to finish off
my pinnacles and decorate my desperation, to complete
anything worthy of a prayer, or even just a thought.
I fashion iron bars and wrap small rods around each other,
iron supporting iron to support
stained glass, because every great cathedral has
stained glass windows to paint the light passing
through the nave, which I outline with iron
chains. And when I believe myself to be finished
and imagine a liturgy echoing off the choir walls, I remove
my hands and see a skeleton—armature holding erect
a rusting body with no stone flesh.
I look down at my hands and see they are covered in rust,
and my cathedral too lets rust color its bones.
