#emjohnson

curls up in streams of it

let’s her black coat warm in its beams

highlight her blonde and caramel patches

and black eyelashes

as she dreams of things I’ll never know

sometimes whimpering in her sleep

when she awakes she stretches out

a spotlight of sun still pouring on her whisker face

my little star, a small and mighty joy

i always disliked henry moore’s art. his biomorphic sculptures that vaguely resembled abstracted women irritated me in a strange way and i could never really articulate why.

later, i realized they reminded me of a hallucination i had as a child. i had a bout of sun stroke when i was quite young and still to this day remember how odd the sensations and hallucinations were. i saw all these blobbed figures, fat and skinny, pulsating and changing, devouring things and releasing things and had this weird feeling that i identified with them, became them, became not myself. it was terrifying at the time, imagine tripping as a seven year old. occasionally, in times thereafter, even as a young adult, i would have that feeling reminiscent of my hallucinations, and it was eerie and for the brief moments that it lasted, reality was kind of ajar and something felt off, and i think that is why i so disliked henry moore’s art.

most recently, however, i recognized a funny affinity i have for pre-historic statues and votives. drawn to them for their very biomorphic-ness, for their history and cultural context, for their lusciousness, thickness, strangeness. they are so of this world, so deeply of this world; carved of stone and sculpted clay and filed bone, at the hands of humans, and yet they have this otherworldly sensibility. they seem to be beyond this world, godly maybe. there is beauty in them and humour in them, and i have a deep liking of their folds and mounds and curves. and for their continuity across time and cultures. and for their complete uniqueness, every single one of them…

only now do i realize the likeness of henry moore’s sculptures to that of the varying prehistoric votives that i love. his work is obviously informed and inspired by these pieces of our historical past, and it is interesting that he made a place for them in contemporary life, continuing the thread of these figures across time and across cultures. what he made of his art was a homage to them, not unlike my own little drawings of specific votives that have inspired me and connected me to art of the past.

a few sketches of mine from the archives -

upon first glance - a stone grey day, bright and achromatic wrapped your leftover fish and chips in newsprint

after lunch strolled along the bayfront trail searching for remnants of summer -

violet new england aster here swarmed by rusty-patched bumble bees humming in chorus

ruby staghorn sumac there with felted leaves changing to lust blushing over our admiration of how soft its stem, leaflets and clusters feel

a roost of monarchs fluttering milkweed to milkweed once pulled apart a pod, dispersed its fine white-haired seeds - soft as velvet, as pearly as our grandmother’s hair

thickets of grey dogwood with their white drupes dancing between shrubs and blurs of greenery like strings of ornamental lights tangled around evergreens

we catch sight of a downy woodpecker so precariously perched, its red nape an emblem of perhaps plain joy - simple, unexpected

around a bend in the pathway you spot a spawned salmon floating on its side its belly still soft pink, eyes turned stone white it is so large up close, the size of an overweight house cat prehistoric-looking and speckled in constellations

cicada nymphs crawl out from shallow graves to scale cypress trees march in droves toward outstretched limbs high up in patchy canopies where sunlight streams on their rusty shells they moult their skin in the evening dusk

awake as iridescent winged things begin the day by song drum their hollowed bodies to stir the heat by pulse reverberate waves of static whispers their harmony a hum

chirp as they carve keyholes into bark to lay their eggs in nest fumble to take flight they echo their nightfall swarm a symphony with chorus of snake tongues ring like a wave caught in an infinite churn

i had been waiting for a sexual revolution to happen to me for someone to come along and ignite my flame

i was convinced that is how it works how anything deeply felt, works love even - that it was totally in the hands of another and a fluke to possibly chance upon the right person to catalyze a kind of desire and vitality within

shorelines describe where land meets lakes

coastlines describe where land meets oceans

i watch from the shoreline

the way sheets of ice, cracked into aggregates,

slosh together

little slaps, spewing glacier cold water upwards

akin to seeing the splashes of fish

spawning in the spring

without spotting the actual fish jumping

i think - we missed this growing up, winter at the lake

but how immensely beautiful

to come to know it now

with the kind of real-time appreciation

we always want back

the things we’ve given up

even when giving them up

was the right thing to do

and even if getting them back

wouldn’t change wanting

all the other things

i almost missed it - that summer sunset light streaming in through my bedroom window a brazen honey so bright i could see it through my eyelids as capillary orange.

that’s the sunlight of my childhood sitting around the dinner table - sunbeams spotlight grilled corn, the salt shaker, tin-foiled potatoes, a buttery knife, my brother's rib sauced grin i would drink whole glasses of milk back then, wrap well-chewed meat in napkins ask if i could sing at the table, and say grace before meals

my family was all there, all alive and young, the soft light sifting through the kitchen blinds, illuminating specs of fuzz in the air; our dead skin cells. our love, all out of focus and sun stained