Polak & Duggan – May 2025
Teresa Duggan and Kate Polak traded art and words. Teresa shared this image, titled “Nature Shine Surprise,” with Kate:
In response, Kate wrote this poem:
What Woods Might Do
Some trails, worn by enough treading, don’t need
markers, telling you what your eyes and soles
already told—the dust tamped to ease the way.
But there was never just one way to head, shimmered
gleam chiming light at the roots of the tree, eight
diamonds glowing, only one stark space that’d
take you to the deep end of the river. Light through leaves
startles the mirror’s surface, it breathes out what’s
before it, so there’s much to see behind you when
it drags your eye from shade to misplaced glare and you only
see where you are and were, the cabbage whites clouding
over spiderwort and purple cress, how any time we see
ourselves, however misapprehended, is self-portrait, brook
reflecting just enough of what’s become of us to draw
bodies further down a bearing that ends in a chain across
other paths what might have been. There are blazes, though,
solid white, blank where you can forget who you
made yourself, the cairns recalling slow hands picking
flat rocks for skipping, flags and posts, and, along this rare-trod
route, the mirrored star and blue bottle tree. Wayfinding
such that we might learn to be something else than sleek
masks of unsated needs, burdened with legibility, when the augury
only casts the ferine tilt of eyes, shaking the cultivation
from our gaits, unruly hair tangling in the rising wind.
* * * * *
Kate shared this poem with Teresa:
Desire is Unheard Prayer
(like everything else I have
somebody showed it to me and I found it by myself)
-Lew Welch
In any given week, I’m collecting small objects
to give to you
(I almost never give them to you)
very often shells, especially cowries
which I don’t come across often
and remind me of a time when
money could be found with time
also sea glass, on the edge of the Gallic
lucent as your eye, sifting through black
stones to the rhythm
when a word was enough
to make me
(usually, I find my grace)
fall
but just as often, smooth stones
like in Key West where I hefted one
that felt about the weight
of your hand those flashes you’ve let
(which was probably its own heaviness)
yours rest in mine
and poems of course, mine, others’, sometimes a dozen
in a week
(I usually don’t send them)
not always trying to say something
unspoken
not always a gesture
then there’s the leaves, petals, so lush, dwindling
to brittleness as the days pass
and becoming something lovely
in another way
(can’t even imagine putting them in your palm)
and then disintegrating
like the Viceroy wing I held
for a long while thinking of
(couldn’t gin up the gall)
knotting it in a green silk handkerchief
and slipping it under your office door
oh, and the pictures, where I come across
an old one of me cuddling a baby
goat, or made out an Io moth
in the last longleaf pine
near the beach
(you know the ones I send instead)
my books are crowded with flags
(I don’t surrender to anything ever)
marking lines I think you’d
like to have, or that made me bite
the inside of my cheek
it might not make sense, to gather so much
and never give it over
but this don’t need
a byline
it’s enough to do it
to feel that
(perhaps more than enough)
there can still be mystery in devotion
and the only reason I find
these little magics
(they are true)
is because they conjure you
In response, Teresa made this image, titled “Mystery in Devotion: Pocket Treasures on a Green Silk Handkerchief”:
