Installation in 3 Rooms: Possibility & Enclosure
I. Setting
The room is grey and dim. A single spotlight provides instructions on where to look—the last place you would: the wall beside the door you came in.
You must place yourself, shield your eyes against the bright, keep your own shadow tucked in, to see the quilt of ultrasound photographs that hangs on a dowel. They are staple-sewn, private fetuses peered at with sound, solitude given contour.
You could not recognize any, even your own, because they are not yet babies. They are the turning edge of an echo.
*
If you squint, inexpert, you will find
the universal beginnings—spine, heel, reflex of heart—
clasped to batting and whimsical
pastel backing.
All of it crinkles. You could never
wrap it around anything,
not any
fragile body.
*
The next room is dark.
From the walls dozens of eyes
glow red so that you read
a humming.
As you stand, a sound arrives, an underwater burbling
that grows until you are submerged,
your panic like an image
developing.
In the corner, a special lens invites you to see what is beyond you:
that the eyes
are the eyes of babies
in their bodies
of need.
*
You rush to the next room:
white walls silent, too bright.
Words hang from the fluorescent light
like a birthday banner:
They Could Be.
*
You find the door where you can leave.
It is framed by an elaborate script of vines
that reads Cervix, Ripening.
A paper towel dispenser offers
folded sheets of lullabies,
plain font, lyrics only.
II. Liminalities
Outside the door, you are in
a hallway without instruction.
You hear from somewhere traffic,
men shouting, children crying.
How do you exit?
Is it a beginning or an ending?
The babies in the other room,
their eyes won’t blink.
III. Haiku on Furthering
Possibility
has a heartbeat, electric
-ity programming.
Biologically?
Parasitic, proving you
can love what eats you.
IV. Post-Script
I will fall to my knees before you,
big monarch of your little country.
My heart pumps salt tears.
They squeeze out of
my kidneys, my liver baffled
by its bile of love.
Installation: Disadornment
I. Woman, Viewed
The room is unfinished. White. Lit by a daylight fluorescent. Propped against the wall, a piece of drywall, torn, three feet wide, ragged paper overhanging.
Spraypainted upon this in inexpert graffiti:
WoMAn.
You look around the room, hopeful, expectant. But it is only this. The door has closed behind you. You feel a slow yeast bloom of anxiety. It is only natural that you would turn and leave.
II. Woman, Viewed
What do you think of me?
You are a statue with a spiral
for a belly. I think you are infinity.
What do you think of me?
All the feeling.
All the dark, thinking.
All the thought converting
into nerve in the dark
where I cannot see.
What do you think of me?
If you have looked where
the darkness fruits beyond
your seeing, you have felt the edge
of infinity.
You recoil me.
III. Root Vining, Haiku, Haiku
infinity is
birth canal leading bleeding
back. infinity
is woman birthing,
furling girl, vining back, birth
girling woman gasp.
infinity is,
is birth furling hurt only
girls sprung women grasp.
IV. Woman, Viewed
What do you think of me?
I wanted the wisp of grass
but you wove a nest.
Your voice, a single crystal thread,
grew rich with braid.
What do you think of me?
Your thin arms that reached for me coved
and by mistake, you sang me to sleep.
What do you think of me?
Your gaze like directed starlight
I wanted to forever and
only
drink.
What do you think of me?
A rib that sings out for its spine.
I the spine, the instruction,
the nerve endings.
I the think.
V. Woman, Viewed
The unfinished room.
Drywall the torn body of the room.
Upon which graffiti.
Installation: Structure in Green
I. Inheritance
The room is raucous with plants: grasses, flowers, dwarf trees, unbelievably real if they are fake, beyond belief if they are real.
You enter a pathway. To one side, modest sprigs hold up tiny crimson flowers. To the other, large, waxy leaves present bosomy white blooms. Still grasses infer sway.
From beneath ascends the hum of insect song and wing. From all around arrives bird talk, sharp like bright thoughts bursting.
In the palm of a generous leaf a small plastic woman sleeps. She is naked. It appears she is dreaming the green. Another woman is seated in a clearing, arms wrapped around her knees. She gazes at what seems to be a tiny pond rippling, but you see it is a swarm of baby snakes captured in their innocent undulating.
The path turns you back, presents you with a small garden gate, picket of brown wood. When you swing it open, you are startled by a piercing crack of thunder, a sudden bulb of lightning.
On the other side, balanced in a crotch of limbs, a nest of cigarette butts. Among buxom magenta flowers, a crumpled bud of scarlet lace panties.
You are nearly back to where you began when you see in the feathered branches of a tree the bent plastic legs of a woman, feet twined in stirrups of vines, then, in an alcove trimmed into an evergreen, a man in a doctor’s coat—slab of white blinding—arm raised and wielding a cigar like a professor pontificating.
Now you see you cannot leave the way you came. Instead, there is a closet, the rear smashed open to serve as a doorway. The walls are graffitied—Adam was here, suck my cock, for a good time call.
You climb through into a brightly lit room. A road is painted onto the floor—dark asphalt with a neon yellow dividing line. To your right, mile marker 69. Mid-room, hanging from the ceiling, a green highway sign reads Exit Here to Breathe.
The exit is curtained with strands of sky-blue beads into which has been strung a question mark in white.
Viewer, each of you who walks through this doorway walks through with me.
II. Haiku in Sentience
Little lion, purr.
Little grasses, climb your green.
Day flowers again.
III. Initial Dark
I am the first woman in all the world,
the sky across which birds wing.
I am the creek’s going and the fish for whom
ripple is sky and sky is bending.
I am the first woman in all the world
and nothing you have seen.
I have built a cave.
When I am inside, all things turn toward me.
I am the dark, the black birth of green.
All echoes reside in me.
I am the mineral thread weaving
into blankets of stone, steadiest of all becoming,
slowest, closest to the bone.
I am the first woman in all the world,
the dark opening like a lover, a casket.
I am the tooth and tongue and word of the alcove.
I leaf like a forest.
Like a prairie I gold.
IV. Haiku in the Absence of Green
Opening, night is
not maw but arms stretched so wide
even day climbs in.
V. Subsequent Dark
Here it is meadow and flower and tree.
All day long, the sun stares at me,
the animals nuzzle, the birds speak and speak.
There is no peace.
At night I creep away, pull the dark in like a cloak.
I say with you all things are possible.
It says with you all things are possible.
I say by you is all the world made.
It says by you is all the world made.
I stand in the quiet like stalagmite.
I bleed with offering.
I grow by mineral beads, building
a hosanna of stone
from the center of me.
VI. Haiku Exiting the Viewer
Somewhere children call
out, sun rowdy, too. Day moon.
You exit toward them,
want to warn them of
something, the air they breathe. Moon
wanes for you. You want
to rush through time, watch
Moon die and resurrect and
die. You look up at
Moon through a tree. The
children breathing. Moon is white
wax melted onto
green lace. Moon is an
egg laid in a field of leaves.
You must not let the
children hear you weep.
Moon is a kaleidoscope,
shifting, drawing from
you the salt sea.
