week three
Summer flowers in Northern NSW, Australia. Photo: Louise Tate
This heart is sticky like honey, Louise Tate, 2020, oil on linen, 42 x 31.5 cm.
Photo: Matt Stanton Courtesy of the artist and Sophie Gannon Gallery.
Wednesday June 16, 2021 at 10:56am
My heart is hot, cold
wet and sticky
dry like the bush
beating (worker bees at work).
My eyes are open, closed
hopeful in the light of day
fearful of the dark
(those unknown depths, they frighten).
My hands are clamped and clenched
in sweaty fists
pause, deep breath
(my psychologist tells me this helps).
My hair is messy, flyaway
wind-whipped and never neat
a home for the bees
the flowers, the leaves.
My arms are open, open
for the lost and lonely
embracing the sky
those endless blues.
- Louise Tate
Her horizon seemed to her limitless, Louise Tate, 2021, oil on linen, 152 x 121 cm.
Photo: Matt Stanton. Courtesy of the artist and Jan Murphy Gallery.
Boulder Creek at Night. Photo by Danny Gurung
Lamplight hits a cloud of gnats and shatters into pieces off their wings. We brush away this sudden spasm of silver. We don’t know any better. What the way lacks in length it makes up in beauty. There are trees. There is the creek. There are flowers and their shadows and our feet that bob beneath their shadows. This kind of night belongs in a notebook. When the world is quiet, it’s easier to belong.
So we walk deeper, talk deeper, on a trek into the woods and through our outer houses. Every so often there’s a figure on the path. They say hello or step aside. We dance around each other, unsure of what we’re seeing. Like buds in the night, this year we’ve been growing when no one’s looking. Our hair is longer, maybe it’s all gone. Either way a choice was made. No justification necessary.
But here hasn’t changed. It’s still the same place my sister and I used to call fairyland. Still the same bank my friends and I used to sit upon and dream of living together in one of the houses on the hill. Still the same dust in my sandals. One day I’ll have to accept that we live in circles, that trees grow in concentric rings, that when a thrown stone meets the water, it ripples.
Still, the moon smiles, her light falling on our faces. I open my mouth and swear I taste outer space on my tongue. She gives because it’s what she does. We take because it’s what we know how to do. Somewhere past where we can see the creek gurgles softly, croaking the same song as yesterday. Now that the skin on the back of my ankle has grown back I walk into the water, feeling waves rush round where the wound once was. The creek doesn’t know I skinned my foot dancing to distract a kind of death, no, only that it’s been a year since I visited. And we missed each other.
- Danny Gurung
Views from a creek in Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee. Photo: Gyun Hur
Let me enunciate.
Bless - ed - ness.
I am adding ‘ness,’ turning a forever grateful adjective into a claimed noun. Cana’s Wedding divinity is delivered here today in Soddy-Daisy.
Soddy-Daisy sucks me into her emerald green.
My inside twinkles with her coolness for the rest of the day. She fights the Southern heat and churning of my unfiltered nightmares.
Dipping inside of her again,
I whisper,
Ah no,
I enunciate.
Bless - ed - ness.
Sealing what you and I have received from her,
I christen us
with glistening tears that soak my hair for days,
with sun left on my thighs
to burn up our curses for many more years to come.
- Gyun Hur
Views from the artist’s studio in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Photo: Gyun Hur