Borders (Puppetry
for Long Distance People) 2016
Wood,
acrylic
58
x 55 x 53 cm
Saturday, July 30, 2016
Monday, July 25, 2016
Air Rights
Darling,
one way to think of it is
I
required absence and you
life-long
a room just left. Except
you
bloom not empty half-light
but
a stand of trees at the edge
of
the meadow where my life
leaks
out. Static is the soundtrack
of
the cabbie’s dream but oh
how
we love our troubadours,
sad
acoustic boys and girls,
sunshine
in their throats. Some
days
it takes all my concentration
not
to pick the lettuce that lives
down
the street. Then I wake
with
tendrils between my fingers
and
once again I’m feigning
innocence
on the one hand,
aping
grief on the other. See,
I
would eat the lily from under
the
frog, drink the river between
each
strider’s wake. It's my way
of
feeling productive, of not
too
terribly envying the swan
still
as a figurine on her cloud mirror
until
the trees go back to normal
which
is a kind of sleep instead of
clawing
magnificent at the sky.
Lisa
Olstein
Thursday, July 7, 2016
Thank you note to those I don't love
I
owe so much
to
those I don't love.
The
relief as I agree
that
someone else needs them more.
The
happiness that I'm not
the
wolf to their sheep.
The
peace I feel with them,
the
freedom –
love
can neither give
nor
take that.
I
don't wait for them,
as
in window-to-door-and-back.
Almost
as patient
as
a sundial,
I
understand
what
love can't,
and
forgive
as
love never would.
From
a rendezvous to a letter
is
just a few days or weeks,
not
an eternity.
Trips
with them always go smoothly,
concerts
are heard,
cathedrals
visited,
scenery
is seen.
And
when seven hills and rivers
come
between us,
the
hills and rivers
can
be found on any map.
They
deserve the credit
if
I live in three dimensions,
in
nonlyrical and nonrhetorical space
with
a genuine, shifting horizon.
They
themselves don't realize
how
much they hold in their empty hands.
"I
don't owe them a thing,"
would
be love's answer
to
this open question.
Wisława
Szymborska
Translated
by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
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