Monday, August 9, 2010

New "Flaming June-July" by Jennifer K Dick

After Liane Lang’s video, Leighton House Museum Flaming July show ongoing to Aug 15, 2010.


*

This impersonalized come into howl or would-flail. She windmills, wild-eyed as after the surfaces of before. Time ticks. Crumbled old flare on the mantel, trapped in photos, in this somber bedding too heavy to lift. She’s sadness. The creaking, boarded-up, hoisted. Says “sack” or “abandoned”, asks “What is?” Trapped dreams ticking. Time is no escape hatch. The iron bedposts to the frame gilds the shed of lives. Crossbeams pull to dust, the old potato-emptied skin ricochets between-space. Caught. If only she’d given in, round a stroke-stole chime. All objects singing backwards. Boards black, attached in the corner under a salt-cellar stair—day and night, guilt and grating. She is her voice, retracted into arms air-signalling language. Tongue never noticed. Scraped canister. Leighton’s ghost clocks tick, tick. Shade or shadow. Old gilded mirror and framed lies salvaged or stored. Bolster the banisters. Time twined into her.


*

Then to awake on a boy’s palm. Lifeline. What can a table or spirit measure? Tails, or heads unsure. Split bedside. What’s to weather? To be? The hill glows—bright stump of a face or a southern seacoast hot against her. Blink a few times, back into her curled body wrapped as an orange now growing, glowing, closer. Life turns to azure, as fire must flinch or be a bird high-up, remain where a ribbon of cloth dreams, is caught sleeping alight. Keep spring from his red throat, calling out to paths seeping still. She is only a mirage caught in a fire, licks at the boy’s ankles. Eyes, thigh, heels. He does not toss into air. Woman in a long field formed from a dream where he ducks out of view. An old sorceress in an mandarine hat, trace or treeline. Then blue stairwells. An echo, where she turns.


*
Medusa’s raft round her, enfolded. Everything is blown. What sets sail? Stone, hearth underfoot. Listening? To list into. Bed of crumpled duvets. Wartime-crushed voice too muted to tap, traipse, crawl back out of the rucksack-earth growling upward. Trenched. Structure of a shadow where shades vie for rescue. Time has poured sandbags too far. Cornflower blue, beige, wheat fields shorn short as summer. Stamp-hues fading. Things like asking for the beginning point, departure. Roam, say, flight. Dams too often, too few to seep into. A passage she recalls, or is called towards. Sound familiar as Charon’s ferry. Doll taken away, back, porcelain-powder, wax, glaze given up. Tectonic plates vying for surface structure. Posted, there, the girl who would (could) answer. Thames’ tides, and broken dikes. Collapsed markers on a fade. Feeling of night. A glow.


**(click museum name for address, show name for more info & Liane's name for her site).

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