Landscape Peopled with Figurines
— based on the artwork of Melanie Vote
Many have been employed
unearthing the remnants of culture,
wrestling artifacts and knick-knacks from their cribbing –
but our frames are too slight
for the collection of fears we carry. Especially
worrisome at the ravine’s edge, we stand and trade
rumors of those who have fallen.
The trail is fashioned of questions.
What is this place? How can I
determine the scale of things?
What warrants restoration? Why has this,
and not that, survived?
I tiptoe, transformed to a modern minotaur
rummaging in my rough way through ruins.
Barefoot and entranced, I have come to inhabit
the doll’s head, called by others the godhead,
entered by stringing together scraps
of natural refuse. You may say this is rustic.
Unable to discern the vile or holy events
that deposited these relics, we cling to hints,
traces of recalled dream, a canvas knapsack
we cannot open, a dress thrown to the ground,
and make use, and make lives among them.
History is inescapable that way.
None among us starts fresh.
Despite our excavations, the end of the story
is always just out of earshot, an abandoned campsite
with embers still hot under the stir-stick.
What we agree upon is this: the infant
at the fence line has never been easily pacified.
“Excavation” / oil on panel, 8″ x 12″
* * * * *
Regarding the Question of Ownership
— after Melanie Vote’s series “The Washhouse”
The rain on the tin roof of the washhouse runs off the backside,
hitting a slab from the maple that was taken down
by a professional crew earlier this year. The washhouse
had a thick cement floor until two little girls smashed it into pieces
with a sledgehammer and stacked the irregular chunks just outside the door.
The painter comes year after year and assembles her easel
to reproduce the details of this structure. She can’t paint fast enough
because each season further weathers the boards. Last year, entering
the wash house, there was a pile of fine dirt as tall as our knees.
It took a live trap to know for sure that this was the work of a groundhog.
We relocated it 6 miles away. If you look at the outside of the shed
you don’t know what is going on inside. If you look at the inside of the shed
you don’t know what is going on below it. If you look below it
you still don’t know the history of this land, the way this soil
didn’t even start out here but was carried in the skirt of the wind.
There is a kind of enlightenment to be found in staring at one thing,
and somehow by doing so maybe you can come to know about the baby
buried in the yard, or about the woman who camped alone by the fire ring
and heard voices all night. Maybe you can even come to know
about the osprey who hunts the pond using positioning to obscure
its own shadow-warning from the fish. The present just keeps
heaping itself onto the past, so many layers of wallpaper,
so many decades of flooring, carpet over linoleum over wood.
When we add our own part we write messages inside of the walls.
During the renovation, countless people asked why we didn’t just bulldoze
the place. Much like others asked, years earlier, why anybody
would sell good farmland to the state. The barn here is not suited
to modern equipment, but we haven’t torn it down, not even for the good money
people say they will pay for the ancient boards. I pay the taxes every year
on this property but I am still mystified how a person can own property.
There are philosophers who believe we only rightfully own what we produce,
that owning land is a form of theft. And Emerson declared the landscape
belongs to the person who looks at it. I don’t understand how it could be
that I can sell a walnut tree to a tree buyer. How can a person own a tree,
something time-rooted in this drifted soil? Consider how this tree
began here, long before I was born in the delivery room of a military hospital
in a far-away state. How this tree was already finding purchase
in the loess soil. The name on the title has changed three times since then.
Because it is my name on the paper at this point in history, I could sell
all of the trees; I could girdle or fell or burn the trees; I could bulldoze
these hills and this house and this barn. I could sell the dirt by the truckload.
For $1000 a year in property taxes I can trap the groundhogs, make a junkyard
out of the barn yard by stacking old cars and ruined tires and travel trailers
that have seen better days. I could farm it or I could charge someone money
so that they can farm it, because somehow in the twist of history
this became temporarily mine. But I can’t stop thinking about
what the painter’s dad said. Everyone has to have some place to be.
So if you throw an imaginary grid over all of the land that exists,
and print plat maps that show who owns which piece,
and you bind those maps into books that are reprinted year after year,
what happens to the people whose names are not in that book?
from “The Washhouse” series, oil on paper on wood, 12″ x 16″ (2020)