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/
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