A Fragment, with Mask and Horn

- after a drawing by Cheryl Dodds

There were obsessions.  Mine and yours.

Distractions really. 

Life getting in the way

of life. 

  Yours was brush or pencil or camera,

with swirls of black and grey on walls of white.

No time for a splash of color. 

  And mine?

A word, a space, a voice. 

      Like Borges thinking

of Borges - knowing a truth, with its grinding bent

on horizons of doing and undoing, but no map

for charting there to here. 

       The mask holds the sea

in its hard grooves, looks on, while the dancer wakes

the primal need of take on take, in a twist of brass

and spit, in a dream of flesh with its poundings of

sweat, of desire, in a breath that's more than wild.


~


Cheryl Dodds
Sam Rasnake

notes on the process