ponder
I think of water as the ultimate form of androgyny.
– Roni Horn*
avant! collapse in
the poetics of the world’s physique
(we’re not about Atlas here
we’re about everything might be quantum but gravity
that is, love
in all her abundance blurring
the keys the
vibrations, um, volitions, hey
we’re stringing you along here
ask why the equation-filled
blackboard can effect
what anything fancier can’t?
postgrads and prof alike leave
last week’s constellations untouched
each in turn erases a central elliptical space
in the simulated wasteland of tendentials
and puts there now thoughts in
a new form like
spinning trumpets
and a likewise brass cacophony
of instruments falling
down a brute black sky
euphoniums
euphoria
a trombone’s
long swoon gone)
but what has this got to do
with water?
why is it always so
un-familiar?
* My gaze alights on the water – on some spot (this spot) on the river. And as my gaze alights it feels as though I am seeing something I’ve never seen before. How does water remain so unfamiliar? … I think of water as the ultimate form of androgyny.
– Roni Horn, concerning her work Still Water (The River Thames, For Example), 1999 in TATE ETC 1 MAY 2007: ‘The master chameleon: Water’ at https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-10-summer-2007/master-chameleon accessed 11 July 2023