Moore & Cormier – Aug. 15

Melissa Cormier and Catherine Moore traded art and words. Melissa shared this collection of digitally altered Lumen prints with Catherine (click any image to enlarge):

In response, Catherine wrote this poem:

Time Lapse

Dream-catchers, eddy lines, wing beats,
light-kissed like Dali’s love child dabbed from thin air.
Time collapses over landscapes, in the gap we wait.
A day’s length in sun and scraps
begins with the undesirable:
fogged paper, flattened weeds.
(A wish) it becomes the watercolor blur of a lumen print—
an apparition’s dark reflex on flaxen sheets
radiant dissolve, dappled solitude,
a third-person omniscient.
Each gaze to coax some wrung beauty.
The supple pulled from shadows that wallowed
in insignificant hours, and serendipity.
There is perhaps light in the spectrum of everything.

* * * * *

Catherine shared this poem with Melissa:

The moon insists

                                    on nothing—
long departed, stone flesh, alone as Lot’s wife.
It may beguile a gaze towards
its blank color of reflection, but a moon
does not need poetry or whatever occurs to us
while wiping our cold noses at night
gawking at the empty above, thinking
we can sense its meaning as if
things that are dead will return.

Or if we fill this emptiness between us
with stories, if we gift into this persistent void
the moon will insist on our water-bound moods.

And that begins the romance: we watch it,
woo it, we kiss under the witching light, place
delicate pleas where blackness never ceases.
Though the moon does not notice us
until it’s time to take back the tide
from our bodies, and return it to the sea.

In response, Melissa made this cyanotype print onto watercolor paper, entitled “selenic blues”: