Echo's Cave and the Horse With No Name
The world has turned seven times since pulling off 95 S to pee and everything was changing except that wall over there. The world has turned six times since opening the letter and a single grey hair falls out. The world has turned five times since you, me, and the window makes 3. The world has turned four times since the bottom of the ocean. The world has turned three times since he looked down and she saw up. The world has turned two times since the bull went on forever. The world has turned one time since pulling off 95 N to pee and everything was changing except that wall over there.
Learn To Be Hot (Learn To Be Cold)
The painting has such regard for realism that it even shows drops of dew dripping from the flowers and a bee settling on the flowers--whether a real bee has been deceived by the painted flowers or whether we are to be deceived into thinking that a painted bee is real, I do not know. But let that pass. As for you, however, Narcissus, it is no painting that has deceived you, nor are you engrossed in a thing of pigments or wax; but you do not realize that the water represents you exactly as you are when you gaze upon it, nor do you see through the artifice of the pool, though to do so you have only to nod your head or change your expression or slightly move your hand, instead of standing in the same attitude; but acting as though you had met a companion, you wait for some move on his part. Do you then expect the pool to enter into conversation with you? - Philostratus the Elder, Imagines 1. 23 (trans. Fairbanks)
And Tides Beat Through Your Sleep
Desire born of the inability to see the stars. If ever you’ve slept on an island, or if the heat was ever hot, you know what I’m saying. There’s one end, the other, and everything in between plus out there where whales avoid plants or rocks (bones) and things. Just trying to stay pain free.
Desire
Ultra Light Down
Nobody Loves No-one
International Latitude Observatory, Ukiah, CA
What we see is resting on a horizon, Out to sea
Diana’s Temple crumbling around us, pillars of stone made strong with aging mussels, A crooked pyramid at 38 degrees rests unsteadily, offset by the straight edge, that constant visual correction
What we see are three mounds laid out on a line, Rocks rocks rocks, As crystals, gems, fossils, islands, memorial sites to past pain not distant enough yet the days go by, Each tick closer to being further away
What we see is a monster lit by flame, Our mother’s hand, a comfort, Fire-set sheep run through a forest, leaving virgin land in their wake, Hephaestus forging mercurial expansion from the burn of Saturn’s darkness is this year’s scirocco
Blowing in hot, with a curly-tailed warning, sauntering through the square just before midnight, We shoot whiskey with an Irish poet and toast the possibility of chaos, of leaving, of not knowing whatever comes but what has been and is still now, even now, And we laugh
What we see are hills splayed in all directions, mist rolling in, quickly moving cool and wet, Bright sun heats hot rocks that hold its warmth for hours after, Even into an empty crypt shaped to fit filled concrete Even into the night, Where we lay down roadside on beds of stinging greens and goat shit
Looking
Waiting For stars, while we compose our three true desires. We get 2/3
What we see are men gathered at the square, their boys practicing along the edges
Looking
Waiting They sit on the church steps, hovering around the crypt or perhaps on top, Where holy bodies were hung and drained and rotted and piled, Before being sealed, before becoming the flat planes upon which weekly worshippers walked on their way to the altar
What we see is a garden tended by the sisters, who say they will pray for us from bare rooms with abundant views, Ripe blackberries on the vine, Chosen carefully as we walk further into the Tardara forest
Or up to the breast-shaped hill
Or into the valley below
~ Tusa, Sicily, 2018
Apparent Horizon
Destination
As we rode into the village we came upon
a convergence of old customs: there was
an empty house and the door stood wide open.
The men from the village lugged a cupboard into the house.
The men from the village hauled a table into the house.
The men from the village heaved a bed into the house.
And the women of the village bore
dishes and plates and glasses and something to
make the bed habitable into the house.
Then the men pushed a son inside.
Learn to light a fire, they said,
learn to put out a fire, they said,
we’re latching the shutters.
Then the women pushed a daughter inside.
Learn to be hot, they said,
learn to be cold, they said,
we’re barricading the door.
- Hester Knibbe
Eclipse
Science and Darkness
Installation View BABEL Gallery, The World Has Turned (Install photos, Susann Jamtoy, Artscene Trondheim)
As the World Turns. A 54 season soap opera born on my birthday. It chronicled fictional lives in concentrate form – cyclical tragedies, joys, boredoms, and love stories in faster, brighter, and more beautiful forms than it's viewers'. The show was a perverse indulgence, a total success.
She was dying. The drive home was ten hours due south on Interstate 95, including a pit stop in Jersey. Failing to find a toilet, we found the defunct Trails End Motel instead, whimsically decorated with rough-cut plywood horse and buggy, painted pink, nailed against a slate wall. And again – and then, after.
Installation View, The World Has Turned (About Time)
In the summer of 1987, it won its first of four best daytime TV program Emmy awards. As the World Turns closed daily with rolling end credits set against a spinning, space-bound earth. The story always continued.
There is a tiny beach at the tip of Pioneer road on Orcas Island, a cut of land set on a strait, miles from the mainland. It consists of cliffs, boulders, and the shards that have worn off of them. There is a cave on one end, a mirror on the other, and sky in-between.