POET’S CORNER: “PODS” BY KIERSTIN BRIDGER

13 Aug POET’S CORNER: “PODS” BY KIERSTIN BRIDGER

Editor’s Note: Kierstin Bridger is the 2011 winner of Telluride Arts’ Mark Fischer Poetry Prize and a regular contributor to Telluride Inside… and Out. Possibly the edgiest member of our family of fabulous writers/poets, including Word Woman Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and “Feelosophy” major David Feela, Kierstin surprised us once again with an insightful, incisive tribute to the work of Judy Kohin. Judy is a beloved member of Telluride’s community of artists and the first director of the Ah Haa School for the Arts. Judy’s “Family” hangs in Telluride Arts’ very hip Gallery 81435. Check out the work. All of it. Then celebrate the talent in town and beyond. Including Kierstin’s. (She’s the “beyond” in this context. Kierstin lives in Ridgway.)

Pods

Silver
and pointed
in the gallery widow,
layered in filtered refraction,
an artist’s installation large as jungle dogs,
you could almost crouch inside. They are wire hung
and centered, dangling on about to be. Emergence is imminent,
you think. Do you smell something faintly
industrial; acrid but vanilla?  Mesh carapace, sheathed in thin tin
grid, hand wrought, bulging like seed drops, thin enough to expose
an eerie silhouette of what is creped and what is twisted, coiled and creased,
after a life span of otherness. What is inside is unrecognizable now, in
this era of what will be known as before.
Strain to see, to make out, familiar lines, but no. Not yet.
It was designed to loom larger than an open palm
gift hovering above your gaze. It has to come at you with indentions,
intentional…in your direct site line- while you are outside. It is inside.
It needs to be so much greater
than the speck  in your eye, so you see it arranged brazen and clear,
emulous enough
to set you back into in-utterance. It seems personal, hell
it might even be humming an answer to what you’ve been afraid
to ask,
perhaps these molded masses of weightlessness,
could carry what mordant matter writhes behind your quick
pulsing  rib cage. It is confronting you, with what will be-
but is not yet . It is the clench not the punch, the larvae
feasting
imperceptibly
on what is stored, it is every sour cuff you fed on
till now. Stare a few minutes longer, through your
reflection, through the typography of this
physical space.
See what is translucent and gauzed,
not yet transformed,
spun elsewhere, yet here, now, before
you
an interior like yours; parallel,
and posed,
four fists
waiting  to
unwind.