THE SOLID FIGURE

the pressure of not knowing but caring.

—Ann Lauterbach

Solid only as a photograph is the solidification of something mutable or movable
in time and the specificity of its form can be fleeting as we often shift.
She as a child outdoors and she with a child before a door and she wanting a child
for whom to make a bird in a landscape of statuary.
A child asleep and a man at his table by the sea, mere replicas of one another, she
would like to make a home for each in whatever available field.
If in a solid picture we would admire the light and shadow or the thing itself she
most desires—a place to rest and a body, warm beside her.
As it says, I am mutable and that’s true but a night that doesn’t change from violet
to black, solid as a photograph and migratory as a constellation of geese
is a knight not worth his rescue.
This symmetrical deal, its odd bird-forms of currency, a generous gift of urgency
that we will seal with an embrace at the door of the loneliest poet.
To say rendexvous means we’re playing at a gesture that would be our way of saying
a poet need not be alone to create a solid figure from the materials at hand.
Spread across the floor, her categorical images in beautiful disarray are not a sign of
being chaotic, no, they demonstrate a will to harness the chaos of the daily
milieu like rounding up children at nap-time.
Where we come together with paste, a starling among Romanesque colonnades
and a girl with her tiny girl-hand held aloft as if to say I am your perch.
We come together where the water seems to lengthen and a toy ship is but toy
on a roiling paper sea, where a boy atop a cliff sings the ship safely to
its harbor, the town borders it ablaze.
She is a solid thou, a siren without harmful intentions the way she softly calls
attention to this sad ambit, these western states uncrossable.