Weinberger & Raschella – February 2023

Jes Raschella and Carrie Weinberger traded art and words. Jes shared this image, titled “Campy Noir,” with Carrie:

In response, Carrie wrote this poem:

Re-formation

Once I was a star, now far from home and starish,
my shine dried and gritty, strewn about me like sand.
I sit tight, alone, so not to lose my native pools of light
in this dark and liminal space, my songs fallen
into so many cracks between cloud and rock,
rose and bone, dove and hawk. And where I lean in
to hear, things toothed and serpentine on either side.

Be brave in your worth and ask, is that dissonance
music misunderstood? Celestial bodies burn and freeze,
melt and break, change the weather, yet turn close
and apart in equal measure, and hum to us
their spherical tune from the moment of our birth.

So let us sit together unboxed, shape a new betweenness
in the cradle of a curve, and listen there awhile.

* * * * *

Carrie shared this poem with Jes:

To Live in the World
. . . you must learn to play like a fox.  ~ Machiavelli

It was something said, or unsaid. A task there was
no time for, or done unnoticed.  Another work-worn
day dropped in the leaden dust of unremembered acts.

When across the gulf between what is free,
and what is not, I met a fox in grassy vapor.
Long looks mean fear or love, and I was not afraid.

I wanted to learn how to trot down ditches, and
gardens cobbled with melons, glide over deadfalls,
and twitch an ear to the earth’s secluded music,
foot-scratch of quail, and the wind’s riff on poplar
leaves. How to make a nest of my body in the shelter
of meadow shadows, the moon’s light on my back
silvering untroubled sleep.

Chances are the roadside would in time wear me like
a scab, and all my dross come down to scrambled bones,
but fitting to a fox, made sacred by use for play.

In response, Jes made this image, titled “Play Like a Fox”: