Accompaniment

ACCOMPANIMENT Millicent Young

ACCOMPANIMENT

Millicent Young

In the Absence of Fear

2020 steel, plaster, black iron oxide, fur 22.5 x 17 x 2 inches

Accompaniment

Many streams feed the well from which art arises. Poetry for me is one of those many. It has accompanied me from childhood – discovered, studied, spoken aloud, turned to, shared, written. If good, poetry and sculpture, each with their own vocabulary of material, turn toward the unsayable – that which is breathing at the edge of our knowing, the incomprehensible we seek to comprehend. This project of bringing together my visual work with poems that have accompanied me has been one I have wanted to do for a long time but it could not germinate until now: this pandemic time of such vulnerability and the calling for an intimacy and inter being that we have shunned.

The selection of sculptures and poems was intuitive and the project seemed to make itself. Some of the poems still live as yellowed scraps pinned to my studio wall or refrigerator; some have found their way into the three dimensional form of my work. And still others remain within the pages of a book whose binding is cracked open as the door that won’t close. All are molecules of the larger presence that poetry is in my well. I am filled with such a deep gratitude to Jane Hirshfield, Stuart Kestenbaum, and Rebecca Elson – and so many more – for nourishing the soul of the world with their own.

December 2020

The Kingdom

At times the heart stands back and looks at the body, looks at the mind, as a lion quietly looks at the not-quite-itself, not-quite-another, moving of shadows and grass.

Wary, but with interest, considers its kingdom.

Then seeing all that will be, heart once again enters— enters hunger, enters sorrow, enters finally losing it all. To know, if nothing else, what it once owned.

Jane Hirshfield

A Luminous Site (detail)

A Luminous Site

2020

horse hair, thread, dowels, ceramic, cold wax, wooden frame

144 x 48 x 51 inches

A Luminous Site

Holding the Light for Kait Rhoads

Gather up whatever is glittering in the gutter, whatever has tumbled in the waves or fallen in flames out of the sky,

for it’s not only our hearts that are broken, but the heart of the world as well. Stitch it back together.

Make a place where the day speaks to the night and the earth speaks to the sky. Whether we created God or God created us

it all comes down to this: In our imperfect world we are meant to repair and stitch together what beauty there is, stitch it

with compassion and wire. See how everything we have made gathers the light inside itself and overflows? A blessing.

Stuart Kestenbaum

Luminous Room

2016

hair,

horse

thread, cable 120 x 84 x 84 inches

Marker

2020

red oak, horse hair

58 x 36 x 26 inches

When Your Life Looks Back

When your life looks back— as it will, at itself, at you—what will it say?

Inch of colored ribbon cut from the spool. Flame curl, blue-consuming the log it flares from. Bay leaf. Oak leaf. Cricket. One among many.

Your life will carry you as it did always, with ten fingers and both palms, with horizontal ribs and upright spine, with its filling and emptying heart, that wanted only your own heart, emptying, filled, in return. You gave it. What else could do?

Immersed in air or in water. Immersed in hunger or anger. Curious even when bored. Longing even when running away.

“What will happen next?”— the question hinged in your knees, your ankles, in the in-breaths even of weeping. Strongest of magnets, the future impartial drew you in. Whatever direction you turned toward was face to face. No back of the world existed, no unseen corner, no test. No other earth to prepare for.

This, your life had said, its only pronoun. Here, your life had said, its only house. Let, your life had said, its only order.

And did you have a choice in this? You did—

Sleeping and waking, the horses around you, the mountains around you, the buildings with their tall, hydraulic shafts. Those of your own kind around you—

A few times, you stood on your head. A few times, you chose not to be frightened. A few times, you held another beyond any measure. A few times, you found yourself held beyond any measure.

Mortal, your life will say, as if tasting something delicious, as if in envy. Your immortal life will say this, as it is leaving.

JH

When Your Life Looks Back

2012 wood, glass, lead, steel, text, cold wax, pigments

59 x 56 x 2 inches

Cantos for the Anthropocene: 22-29 (detail)

Cantos for the Anthropocene: 22-29

2017 lead, wax, washi paper, ink, pigment, wire 31 x 32 x 3 inches

When There Were Birds 2019 grapevine, horse hair

Installation at Broken Wing Barn: 216 x 144 x 144 inches

When There Were Birds

2019

grapevine, horse hair

Each Bird up to 120 x 96 x 72 inches

When There Were Birds

plaster, steel, mixed media 22 x 34 x 2 inches

Irreversible Heart

Take away the bird, its hidden singing. Take away the eggshell’s inward iridescence, the slipped-from ease of love.

One branch of maple flares against the cedar darkness, grief that was always present, disguised beneath the green.

Take away the small blue table, the wild apples, the journey’s long perfections. Bow to the ground. Walk into the lion day.

In this dream ii (detail)

Three Times My Life Has Opened

Three times my life has opened. Once, into darkness and rain.

Once, into what the body carries at all times within it and starts to remember each time it enters the act of love.

Once, to the fire that holds all. These three were not different.

You will recognize what I am saying or you will not. But outside my window all day a maple has stepped from her leaves like a woman in love with winter, dropping the colored silks. Neither are we different in what we know. There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor, or the one red leaf the snow releases in March.

Day Beginning with Seeing the International Space Station And a Full Moon Over the Gulf of Mexico and All its Invisible Fishes

None of this had to happen. Not Florida. Not the ibis’s beak. Not water. Not the horseshoe crab’s empty body and not the living starfish. Evolution might have turned left at the corner and gone down another street entirely. The asteroid might have missed. The seams of limestone need not have been susceptible to sand and mangroves. The radio might have found a different music. The hips of one man and the hips of another might have stood beside each other on a bus in Aleppo and recognized themselves as long-lost brothers.

The key could have broken off in the lock and the nail-can refused its lid.

I might have been the fish the brown pelican swallowed. You might have been the way the moon kept not setting long after we thought it would, long after the sun was catching inside the low wave curls coming in at a certain angle. The light might not have been eaten again by its moving.

If the unbearable were not weightless we might yet buckle under the grief of what hasn’t changed yet. Across the world a man pulls a woman from the water from which the leapt-from overfilled boat has entirely vanished. From the water pulls one child, another. Both are living and both will continue to live.

This did not have to happen. No part of this had to happen.

Spool

2012 wood, twine, silk thread 29 x 100 x 43 inches

Each Happiness Ringed by Lions

Sometimes when I take you into my body I can almost see them—patient, circling. Almost glimpse the moving shadow of the tail, almost hear the hushed pad of retracted claws. It is the moment—of this I am certain— when they themselves are least sure. It is the moment they could almost let us go free.

To Enter Into What Is There

2020 steel, plaster, black iron oxide, string 32.5 x 15 x 2 inches

For What Binds Us

There are names for what binds us: strong forces, weak forces. Look around, you can see them: the skin that forms in a half-empty cup, nails rusting into the places they join, joints dovetailed on their own weight. The way things stay so solidly wherever they’ve been set down— and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back across a wound, with a great vehemence, more strong than the simple, untested surface before. There’s a name for it on horses, when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh, as all flesh, is proud of its wounds, wears them as honors given out after battle, small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud; how the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend.

An Unfinished Story 2016 washi paper, red iron oxide, ink, pastel, steel, glass 116 x 24 x 20 inches

An Unfinished Story (detail)

2020

Yoke (after George Floyd)

oak, lead, horse hair, rope, chain 110 x 66 x 24 inches

Yoke (after George Floyd) (detail)

Yoke (after George Floyd) (details)

Prayer for the Dead

The light snow started late last night and continued all night long while I slept and could hear it occasionally enter my sleep, where I dreamed my brother was alive again and possessing the beauty of youth, aware that he would be leaving again shortly and that is the lesson of the snow falling and of the seeds of death that are in everything that is born: we are here for a moment of a story that is longer than all of us and few of us remember, the wind is blowing out of someplace we don’t know, and each moment contains rhythms within rhythms, and if you discover some old piece of your own writing, or an old photograph, you may not remember that it was you and even if it was once you, it’s not you now, not this moment that the synapses fire and your hands move to cover your face in a gesture of grief and remembrance. SK

Temple for Grieving

2012

wood, paper, red iron oxide, silk, silk thread, rope

45 x 24 x 4 inches

Extinction

2017 steel, plaster, washi paper, ink, red iron oxide, pencil 27 x 37 x 1.5 inches

Psalm

The only psalm I had memorized was the 23rd and now I find myself searching for the order of the phrases knowing it ends with surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever only I remember seeing a new translation from the original Hebrew and forever wasn’t forever but a long time which is different from forever although even a long time today would be good enough for me even a minute entering the House would be good enough for me, even a hand on the door or dropping today’s newspaper on the stoop or looking in the windows that are reflecting this morning’s clouds in first light.

Cantos for the Anthropocene: 15-16

2017 lead, horse hair, steel bolts 80 x 15 x 22 inches

Saint Francis

In my backyard garden they are so simple in the compost these fat sparrows picking over the latest seeds or robins hopping around the edges after worms. I watch the way they hop, sense the air around themselves and fly off. And I remember travelling in France in the cathedral in Senlis where high above the massive stones and people humbled by gothic dimensions, I noticed one pigeon had flown in through a broken pane of glass and like a lost soul sought a way out, throwing its body against the unreachable outside, the white light. And a few weeks earlier I had been in Assisi and had seen Giotto’s fresco of Saint Francis preaching to the small birds.

I would want to understand them in the same way if I were not afraid I would break their wings if I touched them, if I were not afraid entire flocks would think only of free food and invade my house, flying from piano to chairs and bannister and there I would be in a house full of birds not knowing how to talk with them, my son telling me they sing

because they are happy my cat trying to convert them into protein. My wife would take the small ones maimed by the cat and nurse them back to health, feeding them through small tubes their frightened hearts beating so fast that they sound like the wind.

She would teach me her secrets and then one day I would heal my first sparrow and driven by my new power I would run out to the road and find a gull splattered on the asphalt and touching its windblown outstretched wing resurrect it and head down Congress Street and begin to heal school children and my house would fill with the souls of broken people, as if I ran a spiritual repair shop where we would hand out little checks that said “not responsible for items left over 30 days” and we’d begin to make them all over rebuilt and winged and able to fly home by themselves at dusk when the air is dusty and red and we look out our windows with yearning listening to souls murmuring as they fly home, listening for the sound of our own so we will know when to open the windows and let them in.

Psalm for Unknowing (4) detail

Psalm for Unknowing (4)

2020

charred wood, plaster, iron oxides, gesso, pigments, wire 14.5 x13 x 3 inches

Opening the Hands Between Here and Here

On the dark road, only the weight of the rope. Yet the horse is there.

Psalm for Unknowing (1)

2020 charred wood, plaster, iron oxides, gesso, pigments, wire 14.5 x13 x 3 inches

Psalm for Unknowing (2)

2020 charred wood, plaster, iron oxides, gesso, pigments, wire 14.5 x13 x 3 inches

Antidotes to Fear of Death

Sometimes as an antidote To fear of death, I eat the stars.

Those nights, lying on my back, I suck them from the quenching dark Til they are all, all inside me, Pepper hot and sharp.

Sometimes, instead, I stir myself Into a universe still young, Still warm as blood: No outer space, just space, The light of all the not yet stars Drifting like a bright mist, And all of us, and everything Already there But unconstrained by form.

And sometimes it’s enough To lie down here on earth Beside our long ancestral bones:

To walk across the cobble fields Of our discarded skulls, Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis, Thinking: whatever left these husks Flew off on bright wings.

Rebecca Elson

Psalm for Listening: Umbilicus

2020

charred wood, plaster, black iron oxide, pigments, gesso, string

36.5 x 11.5 x 2.5 inches

The Supple Deer

The quiet opening between fence strands perhaps eighteen inches.

Antlers to hind hooves, four feet off the ground, the deer poured through.

No tuft of the coarse white belly hair left behind.

I don’t know how a stag turns into a stream, an arc of water. I have never felt such accurate envy.

Not of the deer:

To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.

oak, ironwood, poplar, sycamore, horsehair

108 x 72 x 12 inches

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Jane Hirshfield

all poems used with permission from the author

“For What Binds Us” from Of Gravity and Angels © 1988 Wesleyan University Press

“The Kingdom” from The October Palace © 1994 HarperCollins

“Irreversible Heart”; “Three Times My Life Has Opened”; “Each Happiness Ringed By Lions” from The Lives of the Heart © 1997 HarperCollins

“When Your Life Looks Back”; “The Supple Deer”; “Opening the Hands Between Here and Here” from Come, Thief © 2011 Alfred A. Knopf

“Day Beginning with Seeing the International Space Station and a Full Moon over the Gulf of Mexico and All Its Invisible Fishes” from Ledger © 2020 Alfred A. Knopf

Stuart Kestenbaum

all poems used with permission from the author

“Saint Francis” from Pilgrimage © 1990 Coyote Love Press

“Prayer for the Dead” and “Psalm” from Prayers and Run-on Sentences © 2007 Deerbrook Editions

“Holding the Light” from Only Now © 2013 Deerbrook Editions

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Rebecca Elson

“Antidotes for Fear of Death” from A Responsibility to Awe © 2001 Carcanet

Used with the kind permission from Carcanet Press, Manchester, UK Photography

Michael Bailey

Pete Mauney

Julie Edelson-Safford

Design

Kemper Conwell

Luminous Room (detail)