fiber

Unraveled

A current of remembering simmers beneath the surface, on the edges, seeking awareness. Everything I do is stitched with its color. But I see only its reflection, outlined on the other side of the mirror. My core, my being, is threaded, waiting, but my mind is lost.

Holes fill my reasoning. My synapses are confused, the connections severed. As the navigable landscape grows ever smaller, all my maps lose their meaning. Transformations multiply, and life becomes unrecognizable.

The world now exudes a silent numbness, a freezing intensified by the coldness of wintered minds. We refuse to enter into a relationship with what is real lest we become reshaped by its mystery, its extremes, into awakening, opening. We cling to our tiny virtual selves, unable to see beyond its confines.

Where is history located? I search the fraying patterns for a place to begin mending.

The phrase from W.S. Merwin provided by Lisa for this week’s dVerse prosery, Everything I do is stitched with its color, fit well into the earthweal prompt, where Brendan asked us to respond to an interview with poet Jorie Graham about how her writing has come to be intertwined with environmental concerns. He also provided a poem from Merwin as inspiration.

letting go

why wait for now to pass?
always living in to be—
tomorrow is not where we are, ever

each minute, hour, a chance
encounter we can’t foresee
full of spans impossible to measure

where am I? here and now
and no place else—out or in,
over or under, it doesn’t matter

each fragment itself whole–
each moment contained within
the present completeness of forever

I haven’t written a kerf poem in awhile. The W3 prompt this week, a response to Burden of Time by A. J. Wilson, also has the restrictions of 12 lines or less, and the use of the word fragment. The kerf, a 12-line poem, was just right. You can read A. J. Wilson’s poem here.

Illustrations are two variations on the seed of life motif.

Threads and Circles

1
to be a thread held
on the wings of birds soaring
through vast light-filled air

2
layers merge
separate become
something else

3
stilness waits
to expand beyond
what is here

4
particles of light
that remain uncaught—a song
you can almost hear

5
tethered to itself
or maybe nothing at all–
just an idea

The last Kick-About prompt was Naum Gabo’s sculpture, linear construction #2, above. It brought to mind some small shibori swatches I had that I wanted to embroider on. I meant to do a few of them, but only had time for one. But the others are waiting.

NaPoWriMo begins tomorrow, and I also wanted to post the 5 Japanese-style poems I wrote to accompany my stitching in anticipation of a month of poeming–I have not been writing many new things lately.

The first year I participated was 2016, so this will be my seventh year. As in recent past years, I’ve tried to accumulate a month’s worth of new art to use with the writing. This year, a lot of my inspiration has come from the art of Redon.

barren

I can’t dispute the Oracle’s words.

black blows the skywind–
raw shadowships raining
the bitter storm language of lies
into the bare breasts
of dead mothers

you ask for spring
and the music of love
when the sun is swimming
through seas of boiling blood—

what can grow here?

“There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.”
–General Dwight D. Eisenhower

Since Nina and I started blogging in 2014 I’ve posted far too much art about war.

Ersilia

skulls of saints–
the bones of the dead
dismantled–
spiritual songs

the bones of the dead
seeking a form–
spiritual songs,
grey life

seeking a form–
labyrinth,
grey life–
they are nothing

labyrinth,
consumed moon–
they are nothing–
times chant

consumed moon,
intricate relationships–
times chant
blood

intricate relationships
dismantled–
blood,
skulls of saints

A pantoum mash up of phrases from Samuel Greenberg’s “The Pale Impromptu” for Laura at dVerse, and The Kick-About prompt #13 “Ersilia” from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

The Kick-About prompt immediately made me want to take actual thread and do something three-dimensional to represent the abandoned city of Ersilia. Cardboard boxes were my starting point. Weaving my embroidery floss with a needle between the supports I cut and folded up, it became obvious how the city inhabitants became tangled in a state of impasse, forcing them to move on.

I decided to do a landscape background–the text spoke of viewing the deserted city from the mountains–and I spent a lot of time laying out possible landscapes on my floor from the collage references I had. I then dismantled and retaped a box to make a sort of diorama and glued the landscape pieces down.

Then I had fun rearranging the threaded bones of the city and photographing it from different viewpoints against the background.

Laura’s prompt, to incorporate phrases from Greenberg’s poem into our own verse, made me think of combining those words with phrases taken from the Calvino excerpt. There seemed to be an affinity between the two.

I read “Invisible Cities” in 2016 and posted a review on Goodreads. At the end I wrote: “Certainly it inspires visions that could be transferred to paper…and perhaps some of them will come to form for me at a future time.” And so they have.