mardi 14 juin 2016

Tree Lung

Tree Lung

On the occasion of student artist Rachel Bultje’s installation, “Breath of Life” at Chatham Kent Secondary School (June 14, 2016)

I am what’s left of the Orange Osage and Ash,
their remains lie with me now,
post execution of their roots so
that passers-by won’t slip on a
falling fruit.

I am a museum exhibit of the extinct
Protectors of our health. Each
carefully manufactured leaf, once
healed 2,000 lungs
diseased with asthma, viruses,
exposure to the worst sort of
world.

These limbs used to sway free,
filtering the oily toxins from
their families below, releasing
the diamond-clear air of life.
Now they are bound in this cage
crinoline, as an example:
What not to do’

‘What has been done’.

vendredi 10 juin 2016

Glass Birth at the Glass Academy

Glass Birth

Inside the oven’s core
awaits molten sand and
cullet, broken shards that
have long since lost their
lives and returned to an ash of
soda and lime, gametes ready
for mitosis
at 2,200°.

Jason, like Gepetto before him,
gently gathers a gob of swirling
zygote, like honey on the end of
a wand, turning to keep it latched.
He dips it into a petit bundt
mould, giving it edges, a core
of ridges to form a heart
and life.

Colours are added from the sulphides
and oxides of the Earth: blue
from the cobalt, sun yellow from
the cadmium, and a red of
Mesopotania’s ancient gold
chloride.

Jason’s gaffer pinches the ends,
pulls the soft swirls forward,
turning creation at the glory hole
to add radiant layers of a shiny
new epidermis. He strokes the
newborn head, limbs,
coaching it to reveal its own
unique
character.

Once gestated, iron scissors,
clamp and pull at her base,
water is added as the anti-
element, creating
stress.  Cut from her
maker, her annealing
convalence into
the world

begins again.

lundi 6 juin 2016

I'm Growing Things

I’m growing things. A baby and vegetables,
taking root in the deep soil of
my womb, spreading small
fingers and fragile golden
hair to the boundary of their
containment.

I’m growing things. A baby and vegetables:
first, a wee heart of hemp,
cultivated beet by beet with the
sweet liquid of the sun.
Innate food of the earth seeping into
small passageways to
transfigure the seed into
lungs of leek, and carrot-coloured
kidneys, tiny turnip
branches of our family,
pushing forth into light and
waiflike pathways.

I’m growing things.