And here is a letter I sent to him along with the poem.
Dear Bob,
I’ve been
meaning for a few weeks now to send some thoughts on the print that I sent you.
So here I am, beginning. These thoughts are meant to explain the poem in
relation to the sculpture.
This particular photo of your work
reminded me imaginatively of Brancusi’s Bird in Flight series. The single ray
of light, gold surfaced, slicing through the air. But one of the things that
engages me about the line of light in your
sculpture is that it is natural; it is not a sleek, polished surface, it is not
homogenous in line or surface. The subtle shifts that are part of tree branches
and that are more acutely part of nature engage the eye in a way that
Brancusi’s do not. We cannot really examine Brancusi’s sleekness. The eye just
slithers away from what it sees. It does not rest on the surface but rather
“looks at” the whole. “Reads” the whole. This is not true of your sculpture:
the organic snags the eye at almost any point, but in a way that is pleasing.
There is elegance in the sideways shifts of the organic surface.
So while
the upward movement seen by the eye, and perhaps in the memory of Brancusi,
suggest flight in the photo detail of the “animal” from your “ménagerie”, I wanted to move away
from that in the writing. There is only one image in the poem that is connected
with flight, and that is of the shoes – a person – running through heaps of
apricot blossoms in the street. That running is intertwined with falling, something
oppositional to flight. So the questions that came to me before writing the
poem was: how? And where to start?
I wanted
the poem, physically, to inhabit the negative space of the photo. So three
columns, differing in width. Here it is, in an easier way to read:
A painting here columns
of forecasting
in the Uffizi. darkness round
Sky gold leaf into
which fruit, pink
the air sacred warm
sun cheeked
space cleaving does
not apricots,
to the figures of reach
— rise a bite, mouth
Mother and Child and
fall of full of sudden
who have in turn surface,
the sweetness.
vanished from the lean
slope How hearts
wood panel paint dividing beat in the
peeled in gauzy drops air’s thin elastic
space
faded tears or perhaps integrity of
moments,
evaporated dispersed —
slow rain defying
into bright air. Gone of blossoms, algorithms
of
the eyes nose mouth unfastened, perfection.
cheek and chin. The rising
again Spin of breath
long fingers wrapping in
the scuff zephyrs,
the child’s leg. Only of shoes and
light’s
their outline remains, and running feet vortex
the void of their the
texture of — gleam
substance. And the petals.
Rain of gold
blazing sky
I started
from the idea of gold, which has had so many meanings in art, but one of the
most fascinating I’ve found is the substitution of gold for the sky in medieval
religious painting. Gold is reflective and yellow, almost the opposite of what
we sense when we look at the actual sky. In the poem, the column on the left
describes a painted wood panel I saw in the Uffizi. It was of a Madonna and
child but all the paint had disappeared, leaving only the shape of the two
figures and the gold-leafed background. In
contrast, the right two columns of the poem move back to the photo of the
sculpture itself, they describe the sculpture but in terms of a natural world
phenomenon – the falling of apricot blossoms, which is known in parts of Asia
as an apricot rain. The warm color range of apricots seemed similar to the warm
background of the photo.
Well, I
think that’s all I have in the way of comments.
All best to you and cousin Glenn,
Jaime
