everything is happening at once

everything is happening at once:

her drawings contain everything

when she was a child, her father told her how the history of the earth
is held in those fragments of rock – actually, I take it back – here, on
this kitchen table, her history is held in these drawings

this then, is an archaeological dig

as we speak, she
writes the name directly onto the surface of the artwork but
the letters are not static on this uneven
                territory
               made of hardened clay and
               gesso: they are
               dancing: the word is
               bleeding into a tea-cup imprint: on which sits broken plaster:
that is resting on a drawing her little one did: which is caressed by the
pigment: which is spilling onto broken eggshells

you need to be prepared to work at picking up the fragments she has
laid out

and only then do you realise there is no boundary:

              to draw/
              to abrase/
              is to begin again                 to

build oneself again

she is rebuilding a world here and then offering it to us

as a gift that is saying:

do not give in- to the grief but give- over to it.

allow it to form lines

and mark the surfaces of our bodies
               so that from either side of us
strength emerges
popping and fizzing
               in those bursts of yellow and
               spaces in-between
               the artefacts and mud and charcoal
               and eucalyptus leaves, pigments and
               graphite and gold leaf, odd socks, stains and.,