2024 Spring Show: Metamorphasis

The Liminal Point by Acie Clark

Peter once told me about just noticeable difference, a phenomenon where we can calculate that enough has changed for a subject to notice a change has occurred, volume or hue or how today, it’s gotten so cold even Russell wanted right back inside after his business. Sandy said
to drip the faucet so I drip the faucet and it sounds louder the longer it goes. The sound I listen to, so close to what Nave described, why she has to replace the pads on her flute: you hear a hesitation, fingers tense to try to speak a note that will but won’t come on cue. Imperfect music
is still music if it happens at the moment the sound notices the music
it’s making. Words become poems. I thought being a poet meant I had to know the difference. At some point I became someone who thought differently. I hadn’t noticed I had changed. I must have been looking in some other direction when it happened. As children, we used to say
I almost saw it, when we didn’t see the deer my grandfather told us were in the woods beside the road. Deer, woods, words, poems.
I don’t need to tell you the difference, just to tell you it’s happening.

May Meditations By Sandy Longhorn

Here on the walking bridge,
we rail-lean and dangle
our heads over a wide, slow churn of river. Momentary vertigo
and the false threat
of falling pique our blood,
pinken our cheeks. The air honeyed by the sun setting on city steel upriver. Nothing wild is left.
At home, the wind ruffles each leaf on the sweetgum, the canopy a murmuration of green. Seedpods
dropping to the roof beat syncopated time. The cracked caw
of a flicker’s alarm hurled from a limb.
A cat, bell-strung & belly-slung stalks. The bird carries on .

The Jewel Moore Old Conway Prairie by Acie Clark

The preserve was on fire. Fire all over the field.
I saw what I saw and my mind made sense of things.
I probably had gotten an email, a newsletter with this news.
I kept walking. I had driven there to walk, after all.
The ash formed where grass burned but fell, too.
The ash was like a dream of snow drawn by the wind.
The purpose of the preserve is to show a before-shot:
a prairie reduced to remnants, a room five-acres across
where grass and decay and ash matter. The fire is a part
of this. The prairie is kept safe but kept, and so needs to be lit.
On fire, the field begets another metaphor, an after-image.
What we did, do. I had driven there, after all, just to walk.
A few weeks later, snow fell on the field, which remembered the fires. The snow put out nothing, but for a moment, looked rather believable.