UNTITLED (NOTHING-SACRED-TO-SAY-BALLET), 1979

Welcome to the shoebox. Stitchy inventory of an urban fairy-tale: messy marmalade bedsheet stitched into a curtain; dusty luck-tree with snailed leaves; lopsided reading chair under a burnt-out bulb; a four-inch plastic doll with striped stockings and no shirt; a folded triptych of trees with two panels dangling. A dried seahorse afloat midair. A leaf-rubbing. A starlit teacup dreaming of tea.

The crystal of a kaleidoscope, crushed. A penny in a pill-bottle. A single pigeon feather fastened to your hat. A bazaar of torn paper-corners shouting the corkboard. All houseplants tilted. Everything exists inside of this box; your sky is a box-top. Scrapped-up theater in the wet memory of your eyes. An old blue book bound with allusion.

There's a boxfull of nouns to punctuate the window, they crowd the sill like raggedy orphans around a fallen bird's nest, all their soft little ears sticking out. There's nothing to hear. Quiet trappings with their toes poked over the edge of your crowded shelf. The ground is just below the surface here, piled with nouns to break other places open. Nothing is a forbidden thing to see through. These are the parameters.

Tapping the tacks with a toy hammer, pinning the floor to the wall, all your bumbling efforts at grace make art. A painted drawer filled with imagined mothballs and smooth antique cameos of forgotten women. "Anything imagined or remembered can twist off into something else," they say, "Beauty is about the improbable coming true suddenly." Director exit stage-left like a villain, her cape of crickets vanishing behind her. Your silent conductor slips through the cardboard trapdoor. A curtain goes up and there you are.


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