Williams & Sands – Feb.14

Carabella Sands and John Sibley Williams traded art and words. Carabella shared this drawing, entitled “Menagerie,” with John:

In response, John wrote this poem:

Menagerie

Familiar grotesques
line the walls
of my mouth.
To speak them
is
to taste—
to acknowledge
their taste—
so I am
silent.

In this paper dress, broken
animal-hands folded
penitently
and waiting
for a different
lineage,
I have always been
some delicate
impossible
creature
heavy with silent
impossible
love.

* * * *

John shared this poem with Carabella:

Miniatures

There in the center, the same chapel,
cross cast black over the courthouse roof.
The same birds weighing down paper trees.
Couples doomed to circle the same park, endlessly
in love.
Queues of children wait their turn
to skate this false river, frozen, always
frozen in cotton bunched to look like snow.

But no breath escapes their mouths.
The clay hands I’ve spent months shaping
to appear human
rub together without warming.

While it’s true they’ll never hunger,
never fear the presence or absence of creation,
never roar from the pain of growing
or question the silence within
what they’ve built,
is their almost-life — so achingly permanent
and small — any less burdened by the real?

From my tabletop, the heart of our town
is still brimming with imagined movement.

And a tower of toothpicks continues to hold together our homes.

In response, Carabella made this drawing, also entitled “Miniatures”: