This project stems from our artistic partnership, which began in 2023 when we began sharing studio space as Artists-in-Residence in Greenbelt, Maryland. As we admired and discussed each other's work, Kathy noticed Rachel’s work evoked a feeling that resonated with her poetic themes, spanning her career as both a writer and a painter. Rachel, in turn, was seeking a language to articulate the internal landscapes she captured in her images of the natural world. Together, we embarked on a journey to explore how poetry and visual art could mutually enhance and deepen the emotional experience of the viewer/reader.
Air rumbles in the tomb,
makes ocean sounds,
sings to the lifeless body,
that bodyvessel, gone.For its earlier sky,
mystery and certainty lay
side by side.
When you are underground,
Earth becomes sky
like dirt through which you must see.
I thought when I was little, you were
given special eyes
to see through the box and ground.
If things as things felt displaced
or perished of sorrow, if stones
carried meaning to each other,
if hay gained happiness in its fields,
we might feel safer. Safer.
Our thoughts carry things,
belly, brain, and foot.
I mourn
in the last autumn of your year.
In the middle of November, these days
go back and forth—
one so beautiful that every leaf
burns with the sun, heart-reminding
of golden rays you saw stretch down
from boreal and marine skies,
these rays a picture of what
you thought were gods.
To the Dust of the Heart
Little bits. They glow against the sun.
In the park, the path beside
picnic tables, gnats between you and the west sun,
and the ghosts of
your father, dead twenty years, and
your dying mother, so old.Around them, as Mother and Father prepare
the remembered table,
you children press your hands
on the wooden seats
and table top saying,
loud or soft,
more. More.
You know at dusk when all time is a prairie,
the brain ceases its sorting. It becomes the prairie wind
and blue stem and the light that folds time.
Memory scatters the day, like a woman throwing out seed
for this year’s side garden.
