Wisconsin
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Baby Born on Table Top
Featured:
Paintings:
Drawings & Objects:
Alphonso (a figure & poem):
Making a Figure
With dew along the hairline and gold that lines
(like smooth fabric from inside a suit) the tongue,
the inanimate head form is made
of cooled molten industrial foam, or
sweet potato too long cooked and crumpled
in dark sap on a surface.
Is the body clothed?
The body is clothed in a coat
of malleable screen and rice paper paper-mache;
a marsupial jacket with many envelopes and pockets for
lost things.
What does this body eat?
A simple loaf of bread made by Irma at the farm.
The body’s objects are set in their meadows then.
Here are my drying disposable drawings:
Blurred mark fat with the saliva when my eyes are full.
“Moon, are you on the grass?”
They are of signs, symbols, and indexes: bodies and their absences.
“Moon, do you make slight mis-steps
that lead you astray?”
Demarcations, such as this
skin made from bleach swabbed across manila envelopes (this emits
a faint chartreuse glow). Also, ideas of containment depicted by closed forms traced in sumi-e ink on PDF. Last, décor;
ornament:
spit mixed in egg-carton with dried soot from stove,
then dipped from with toothpick/wool to scratch/rub
soft focus of lantern sound.
It is most doubtful
that we can connect.
Here, a table shoved along the wall
in this box-style flat hall
from where we’d peer (at one another, of course!)
set now with one plate, one fork,
wooden spoon, cigarette in a cardboard square.
Candle singing, “La la la!”
Eyes stare at grenadine colored ground.
In another place, beneath another star,
a light opens its burst of breath around a tin cup of brine, a frying pan with food,
the tears of loony cartoons.
Someone somewhere is home. Cry with me!
In that room, in that moment,
Whoever is drinking the hot soup—
Whoever is bringing what is difficult forward—
Let us examine it,
gently. Is it over, this sweat from the body sopped from the floor and applied to the drawing of the body as paint?
Strange tooth upon this table with wheels,
my hand is brought to my heart.
How much bread was made
and in whose bellies did it float off in?
If it is over
a make-up powder like flour is sponged
to cover the eyes with bandages.
Of specialness and intimacy also of what is other,
it is a tender calendar of windows we are inside.
