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Well, the pictures aren't actually here, but this is part of a collaborative project with a photographer, Dan McCormack. Dan was asked to contribute to an exhibit of photographs based on poems. Rather than make a photograph that would complement an existing poem, Dan wanted me to join him for a photo session with a model, and write the poem on the spot. So I said I'd give it a try. The photo shoot took place at Opus 40, the monumental environmental sculpture that I live next to, and administer. Anyway, here's the poem. It's not at all like what I normally write. DAN McCORMACK PHOTOGRAPHS LEAH, NUDE, OPUS 40, MAY 2007 Rock, sedimentary, formed in the Upper Devonian era, striations etched by pebbles dragged under receding glaciers. quarried a century and a quarter ago, quarried a century and a quarter ago, abandoned, discovered Seventy years ago by a sculptor, reimagined with the imagining of hands, the shape growing from flesh, tanned, calloused, boots and gloves and shorts, then sinew and flesh, straining against stone, the stone yielding, Block by block, quarter ton, half ton, to lever and fulcrum and the resolve of flesh, till it rises, fully formed, and again fixed in time, complete, unfinished, never ceasing to change; it slopes, juts, Curves in here, here out, here planes and ramps interrupted by bushes, birches, branch and leaf and needle, Reflecting sun, absorbing rain, swirling with snow or fog, muted or brilliant, endless metamorphosis, “You can’t get it from photos. You have to see it, enter it, touch it, explore its surfaces and crevices, to begin to experience it.” And so with flesh, not painted, carved, photographed, imagined— Try to imagine Leah’s friend Annie, T-shirt and jeans, curled over her sketch pad, into flesh, but you can’t, Any more than you could imagine Opus 40 from words on paper, or images, Flesh is itself only, and will vanish Soon enough, like the notes from Leah’s violin, into clothes, into dust, into Dan’s pinhole camera, flattened, later to be reshaped, reimagined, digitally manipulated And why not? It will never be the same As this tangible moment. You can imagine entering her, becoming part of her, exploring across her and through her, surfaces and and crevices, imagine her yielding Part by part, imagine the brilliance of sunlight in her eyes, the softness of rain in her breasts and stomach, the swirl of fog surrounding you, But that’s imagination, like the unheard melody of the violin in Dan’s image, channeled into her, form and music melded. Imagination, I can as easily Imagine it with Annie, and I do, my attention wandering, before it’s called back to the palpable immediacy of flesh, the staccato taps of Leah’s bow on percussive strings, And Heisenberg was right: you can’t have it both ways. Opus 40 will change from dawn to twilight, from sun to rain, and imperceptibly over years, As Leah will change in weeks, months, years, but I won’t see it—become a memory in hours, Leah and Annie, like so many passing through my classrooms, always the same age, But I’m older each year, my fantasies fonder if not fainter, and the classroom an enchanted forest, full of beautiful wild animals, tamed for an instant, eating from your hand, lioness and roe, the unicorn in captivity, but all to disappear forever if you reach out to take, Well, Opus 40 is enduring, as permanent as things get, and so is flesh enduring, though transient, as Leah sheaths her magic parts again, and Annie has never shown hers, and they disappear into Dan’s camera, Dan’s car, and for all you know, She may be the last you’ll see, just as one day, though you didn’t know it, a new woman undressed before you, and slipped into bed next to you, and later bent down and kissed you, and walked away, her buttocks swaying, and it would never Happen again, just as one day you will make love to your wife for the last time, and you won’t know, and if you did, You couldn’t hold it and savor it anyway, and flesh will go on, but for you only your own, and that no mystery, only the mystery and certainty of decay, But not yet, and here’s Dan’s Leah, chopped and channeled like a ’55 Ford, digitized, manipulated. smooth, in two dimensions, and under our clothes, stopping in front of it, all of you are flesh, and naked. -- Tad Richards http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/ http://opusforty.blogspot.com/