Calder

It is the act of entering that creates loneliness. I stand, at first, in the corner and can’t bear it, the stillness of them—a child looking up from a crib, reaching. The door at my back leads to a balcony and is locked, boxing wind out of the composition.





The thing about art and especially three dimensional art is I expect it, always, to teach me something. The dialogue between the sun and rare flowers tracking east. The head turning to catch in its gaze the leg of a stranger as they leave the room. I begin to move, to walk about the mobiles.





Outside, on the balcony, leaves skitter in wind. Daylight in and out behind clouds. In the dream I’ve been having lately, is how one might begin a poem in this room. In mine, at a party, I look up and am told I’m the oldest in the room by several rotations. A condemnation. A measure of both time and distance.





Last night, waking from this or another dream, I looked through a scatter of Polaroids on the bedside table. In one, she stands next to a Joshua tree. The sky is blue and cold and she smiles, mouth closed, at the camera.





A family enters and the child moves about the mobiles in a whorl, a step ahead of his mother. Sunlight in a wedge on the wall, over a quotation from the artist: Disparity in form, color, size, weight, motion is what makes a composition. And when the child reaches for one of them, one of the red spades accenting the dark wire, his mother waits. She lets him touch it, once and briefly, before taking away his hand.