Friday Inspiration: Concrete Poetry

I took these photos over two years ago, on my first ever trip to Minneapolis which was both brief and exhilarating.  I found myself meeting up with my friend Ryan who I had met years before in Oshkosh where we'd already had many adventures, and he took both Jennie and I to the outdoor sculpture garden just as the sun was setting and the temperature plunging.

It was a fun night, despite the sub-zero temperatures that could be felt all the way to our bones, or perhaps because of that.  I took only a few photos that evening, pulling my fingers out of my glittens only for brief moments.

There is a surprising amount of words for a sculpture garden, and you know me, I'm a sucker for pretty words.  These are the words that stick with me the most, "And it is good when you get to no further" from John Ashbery's poem written for the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge where the words are engraved, and the vantage point from which the next photo was taken.

By John Ashberry

And now I cannot remember how I would

have had it. It is not a conduit (confluence?) but a place.
The place, of movement and an order.
The place of old order.
But the tail end of the movement is new.
Driving us to say what we are thinking.
It is so much like a beach after all, where you stand
and think of going no further.
And it is good when you get to no further.
It is like a reason that picks you up and
places you where you always wanted to be.
This far, it is fair to be crossing, to have crossed.
Then there is no promise in the other.
Here it is. Steel and air, a mottled presence,
small panacea
and lucky for us.
And then it got very cool.

Poetry: Dinner with the White Rabbit

Dinner with the White Rabbit

Insanity is not dinner conversation,
but the words leak out of my father’s mouth, ink
covering the silence like wine’s red stain
creeping across white linen. Family secrets
of insanity have been hidden, deep in glass
bottles waiting for the white rabbit

to knock them to the ground and let loose a rabid
disease. My father’s need for conversation
was born of broken glass
and pages scrawled with ink.
The coroner mailed my father’s secrets
back to him, renewing a stain

he had believed forgotten. The stain
of his mother’s warped mind on her rabbit
fur stole, her insanity and the kept secrets
of her imaginary adversaries, and her conversations
with air. The documents covered in ink,
told of broken car windows and shattered glass,

the death of a woman I've known only through glass
panes of picture frames and the stain
she left on my father. The ink
speaks in medical jargon, nothing of the timid rabbit
that woman once was, or the remembered conversations
between her and my father, tainted with disease and full of secrets.

When my father finally allowed those secrets
to fall from his mouth, glass
shattered under the weight of a conversation
he had delayed for fear they would leave the stain
of insanity in my own mind. But that woman’s death let the white rabbit
out of the hole, and the ink

from his pen was the blood in me, and red ink
is always wrought with secrets.
I followed that white rabbit,
the creature who once led that woman through the looking glass.
Her insanity had already left its stain,
but I like the white rabbit. I enjoy our conversations.