Witness: Five Poems from text

1.

apprehended, recorded and relived

sprawling venues of multitude

modest poetic and meaningful

A universal theme,

feelings relay loss and remembrance,

charcoal drawings on timber.

discussion

briefly abundant with residue

in the act of recording

one's own life

history can be soothing,

buried artifacts

Carefully and thoughtfully curated

depressive and uplifting, traumatic and hopeful.

the way psyche continues alongside

the entrance of faces

inscribed with peace.

A spectacular scale

of two bodies

text, snapshots

a third, exquisite haziness

wooden moving objects

semi-fictional traces of boundaries

obscure, obfuscated simplicity,

capturing the passage into

real time

the entrance and exit to

Loss

and achingly beautiful ordinariness

of this unspeakable location

2.

touching,

An astute notion

in its physical scale

The result of disparate times

3.

six different cultural parents

alongside

studio photographs of African Americans

'witnessed'

by a ghostly ancestral presence.

4.

A Chinese-born performance hovers,

suspended in New York,

Accompanied by a sheep costume,

white doves enacted a gesture

to dominate the front lawn

wearing a series of calligraphic marks.

conceived specifically for martial arts

5.

Recollections of characters

replete with the momentous symbols

In My Father's House and In My Mother's Garden

followed by a quiet text

containing terms of its installation

transcribed across the gallery walls.

Mad Rain

This is a little poem I wrote yesterday, just before it started raining.

Pokers stand up straight and fiery,

Exercising vain power against the wind

Heat rises up from an unseen source,

Joining with the wind to buffett and call up the rain

Every impending drop a word,

heavy with meaning like an unformed prayer

Every tongue vibrates with anticipation,

straining to translate the relevance of

almighty nature expressing itself in a common way.

Felt by everyone,

enlarged pupils look up at a partial sky

still scraped through with blue,

the remains of a fine but significant day.

But it cannot be grappled with.

The sky falling on warm hands and faces, incomprehensible.