in plain sight

if I could
unknit, remove these
protective
layers—un
knot the tangled breach—release
all I think I know,

return to
pause—recollecting,
listening
to the air
breathing in voices, called by
the resonance of

forest songs,
expanding into
organic
wondering–
(time knows its own creations–
unburdened by clocks,

the display
of exactitude)–
instead, re
placing all
measurement with one quivered
spiraling motion—

I wish to
sing odes composed by
trees—to be
answered not
with thoughts or questions, purpose
or pondering—but

to embrace
my own ring-years—to
follow the
journey of
each tree season, entering
what only seems closed

because I
choose to remain un
asked—having
forgotten
how to merge, integrate my
elemental core

For earthweal, a shadorma chain about elements.

I’ve been taking my portfolios out of the storage room to photograph and archive all the art I’ve accumulated over the past 50 years. In my late 20s and early 30s I did a lot of collage in series, very different (as you can see) from what I do now. These are all from the Wood series. Besides the art there were also some (bad) poems written around collages. But there were phrases worth exploring.

I combined a poem from 1983 with one from 2018 using synonyms for Colleen’s Tanka Tuesday words, change and grow, and some of the words from Jane’s Random Word List.

The collages are interesting, even if they mostly don’t seem very wood-like to me now.

61 thoughts on “in plain sight”

    1. It could! There are others that have that feeling too, now that you mention it. The older stuff will appear every once in awhile, now that I’m taking photos of it. I always feel I’m not very productive, but I really have accumulated a lot of art.

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  8. The elements which call from within we grew all these years, consciously or not; the meditation here is to walk in that wood (what is archiving one’s work anyway), to see it as “one quivering spiraling motion.” Amen

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  10. Enchanting to see these past collages and to know how you’ve woven in those lines that needed more life to find their perfect setting. Time and space and most of all frame of mind to sit with the trees and count our rings together is a shared goal, as you know! I love how you’ve expressed it.

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    1. Thanks Sun. It’s really eye-opening to visit this old work. Some of it I don’t remember doing at all. And I could never do anything like it now, even if I tried. Time and space…still a mystery. But yes, we need to sit with the trees now more than ever.

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  11. This chain of thought is so rich! If only we could untangle all the knots and let the loop float free. Embrace our tree rings—wonderful!
    I like the artwork. The first one seems more suited to a beach than a tree the way I see it. They don’t have the satisfying completeness of your current work. They’re open-ended as if they haven’t decided how they’re going to end. Or else they just haven’t picked which path to follow—youth.

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    1. Thanks Jane. Life was much more open-ended then. And yet, in a way, it feels freer and more full of possibilities now. My work has definitely become more complex as I’ve gotten older. Some of those early collages were just large forms placed in the context of each other on the page. (K)

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      2. By open-ended I am disagreeing with Jane a little, though I love her sensitive observation. The collages are open. I experience them as very balanced and intuitive both in color and arrangements. In their open-ended quality they are like breathing, lovely, natural, felt, and the colors are nuanced and elegant. I am quite sure you can integrate these earlier sensibilities with the complexity that you favor now.

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        1. Thanks for that careful observation Aletha. It’s hard for me to seem them in a neutral way. But there are certainly things, especially in some of the other collage series, that have me thinking.

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  23. Pingback: REBLOG: ‘In Plain Sight’ by Kerfe Roig – The Skeptic's Kaddish 🇮🇱

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