Tending the Corporeal Garden

Poem

by Deborah S. Bosley

the first half of the story

1.
Your eyes see everyone is here
Wings slide dust from shadowed shoulders
While falling snow slips over lips
Perfect beauty moving with time alone
In a garden of slowly greening bodies
Sleeping carelessly trees whisper water
Certainty tells you everyone is here while
Water whispers carelessly
You imagine the slowly greening touch of hands
Moving with time’s perfect secret folds under, before, over
As sleeping wings slide over your lips
Tenderly dusting snow from shadowed shoulders
Seeing everyone is here.

2.
Your whispers shiver between folds of fingers
While summer sun expresses all
Sliding folds slipping through glass
As silken shadows stand in water
Your speechless life leans to meaning
As if deliberately singing dreams behind open doors
Sleep carelessly when you whisper water
Through silken shadows moving
Speechlessly to meaning
You stand alone in water shadows
Slip deliberately through greening doors
Expressing all silent speech
You whisper shivers between silken fingers.

3.
Your touch of perfect beauty
Slipping slowly over tender bodies
Standing in shadowed water
You see everyone is here
Through deliberate sleep
You imagine slowly greening hands
Shivering between silken fingers
As shadowed wings slip between your lips
In a garden of deliberately sleeping eyes
Everyone is standing
In silken shadowed water whispering
Tender bodies, tender bodies
With perfect lips touching beauty.

the second half of the story

1.
Opening your eyes to what is there:
Your frantic hands hold damaged dreams
(Notice how your glass gaze waters
As you shift slightly forward to lost language)
Turning your shadowed face to the wall
You recount stories of similar times
Remembering how deliberately love ends alone
These careless stories mean less
Through faces glaring across glass walls
Your loose gaze wanders from edge to edge
Eyes now merely open

2.
This assault of memories lingers:
Fingers caressing blood flowers
Love strewn across rusty sheets
You, stretched in careless poses
Yearning for shattered caresses
Heart beating dangerously
Dark breath shadowing shoulders
(Listen to love lurching forward
Hiding in mirrored gazes)
This garden is no place to rest —
Eventually all love strikes its atrocious poses

3.
I see now how it must end:
This language of green shadowed caresses
Dissolves tongues in frantic yearning
I will throw these shattered glass faces
At dark empty body spaces

Still, my eyes lose focus
through this greening gaze
I stand near liquid mirrors
Unearthly sighs
sear this crowded garden
D i s s o l v e d e s i r e
Watered by
empty presences
I whisper:

Stay. Move. Stay.

Tending the Corporeal Garden

Tending the Corporeal Garden tells a tale of romance seen through peripheral vision. Images, text, and sound intermingle to play with the vagaries of meaning. The combination, approach, and physicality of the installation’s elements are intended to elaborate a kind of “syntax of the body” in an arrangement that activates the senses while evoking the audience’s intellect and emotions.

The installation consists of drawings of various sizes placed at varying heights on the walls between small, lightly dyed pieces of felt arranged in layers and on which are embroidered individual words from a text written specifically for this work. The drawings, all based on European statuary, depict fragmentary views of the idealized body and sculptural accessories. Some images appear exactly as they would be seen in their original form; others offer reoriented or recombined views — all refer to what is outside the frame, representing just a suggestion of the entire form. With sensuous, imagistic language the poem repeats, loops, and rearranges words, creating a sense of disorientation. The embroidered text is echoed by a taped, electronically layered sound version of the poem.

— Susan Brenner