many couplets on sculpture
(PUBLISHED in Little Patuxent Review, January 2010)

new wood has poetry in it.
old wood is poetry itself,

time having worn off
its prose.
	- El Anatsui

i walked out the back door
in order to imagine peace.

i saw an old wooden beam
lying on the grass, on its side

i rolled it over, and saw that rot
had disappeared most of its center

and a large part of its end:
millions of ants crawled in it.

i stood the beam on its (square) end
and walked around it, looking for

abstractions, resemblances, anything
to bring out, something to sculpt.

i saw a (left) hand emerge, 
the beam became an arm

reaching up. i dropped it
and most of the index finger

broke upon impact. ants
scattered. the hand grew slender,

and i envisioned this beam
cut and painted, not smoothed

but refined, into that ladyfinger
pointing to the ceiling in a gallery.

then i saw the bottom of the beam,
that (square) end exposed since

i dropped it lengthwise again.
it was not square at all.

it was squarish, a squared collection
of the wood-grains stripped and pointing

all away from the hand i had
figured as the point of the artwork.

that end would be hidden
in a gallery, confined

to the shadow of the
sculpture under bright

fluorescent or track lights. then 
i went to a play. but i almost

forgot: while the log (no, the 
beam) lay reposed on the lawn,

a brown cat jumped up on it
(i'm sure it had done that often

before i moved the beam and exposed
the bright green flower-stems under

its rotting corpse: this thing was the
definition of post-structural), looked

at me, and then walked off. i hadn't
heard the cat sneak up on my right,

i had been busy looking at the bugs
knots cracks splits and dirt

on the beam itself -- and now
that i mention it, i'm not sure that the

cat was actually brown, but it definitely
had an orange collar on. or was it red?

you'd be surprised how many colors
one old squarish beam has, or for that

matter, how many are on one old fat
tabby-cat. not that they matched.

anyway, when the cat came, i was
moved to move, and look at the beam

from some different angles. that was when
i noticed the uneven bottom, what i would

have hidden as the base in a gallery 
and not been able to enhance, exploit, or

generally artify... is that a word? "to artify.
verb, transitive. to make like art. to steal,

to re-use. to cheat. to collar, as a pet. to
brand as one's own work, found poetry.

to sublimate desire into wood. to piece,
to peace. to toast. to fake it. to relapse

	into language even a cat would ignore."