FEVER & GERTRUDE STEIN

I am on a high white bed in a pale yellow-stained green-washed room. The sheets (soon to be clammy) are still stiff and competent. Gauze curtains hang from the open windows, billowing in the most low-key way permissible to that verb. There is a garden out there. I can smell it. Sage. Flowers other people’s mothers planted with strong hands. Someone is reading Gertrude Stein. She has been reading for hours. She reads on and on, her voice reasonable and adamant, her throat and excellent teeth feeding out words like highway traffic, patient and inexhaustible. I’m not listening but I hear. I do not like it. I don’t know if it is the cultivated, reasonable voice I do not like, or the clipped and trotting words with which it is freighted. What does it matter? The voice has its own orbit, in the room, near the window. I turn my head on my neck, this way, then that. My cheek falls on the damp pillow. I wonder if the wrinkles from the pillow have imprinted themselves on my cheek. I haul my head from side to side. I am a metronome and someone is reading Gertrude Stein. I can hear that deep chortle of birds, that small bluebell gurgle tucked into the umbilicus of summer, erupting like dice from a shaker all over the garden. Bees hatch their buzz, pigeons and doves their coo. Summer is a drone suspended in yellow light. It tilts all over the green garden. Wild little nasturtiums are frantic to side-step borders, lifting their raggedy theatrical skirts, fleeing or rushing to the chorus. The earth is cakey, very far from a compost. The voice reads on talking of it and what needs and what must and cup. I think soon the door will swing open or sometime and someone will come in with a tray that I will be more or less interested in, raising my head from the pillow to see, or dangling on one elbow to sip or chew. I sleep, rowing out from the fast jetty of that voice and when I wake I come in like the tide toward it again. It continues like the coast. Light fades. Voices call children home. Night doesn’t smell of magnolias or honeysuckle. A cold comes in. The voice stops. Something that was there is missing and it is horrible. If someone comes with a tray now the electric light flooding in from the landing will be too much and the kitchen smells and bangs from downstairs too much. Someone else will talk to me and want an answer that I won’t want to give. I’ll miss that even voice reading Gertrude Stein. I miss that voice. Something was there. Now it’s not. And everything sounds rougher, and I am less able to handle it.


SMALL SCULPTURE 2

This is a short thick plait of wire, hair, fibre, wool, hemp, cotton thread, and elasticated thread. Colors are muted, tending towards brown, rust, mud, bark. A single strand of gold elasticated thread is woven through the plait; also several strands of yellow cotton. The plait is tied at both ends; the wires and fibres emerging chaotically from one end are tacky and glopped together with sealing wax, glue, and dried blood. The effect is of a bundle of severed veins and arteries, some wasted (fibre/wool/hemp), some stained (cotton thread, elasticated thread), some still very perky (wire) or oblivious (hair). There is also a suggestion of more cartilaginous body parts, e.g., larynx, fallopian tubes, cochlea, ligaments, spinal cord.

Materials: plaited wire, hair, fibre, wool, hemp, elasticated thread, sealing wax, glue, dried blood


EPIGRAPH

“I am for an art that is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.”

—Claes Oldenburg