Meg Shevenock responds to Audra Wolowiec’s publication, “SOUND” (Gravel Projects, 2019) featuring work by Rosaire Appel, Karen Donnellan, Elana Mann, Emmalea Russo, and Karen Weiser
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S O U N D is a wave and full of.
Someone is shoveling snow.
Before all that it was blank.
This may come as a memory, but from the street you could see a red lamp.
They kept the curtains open as the record played.
Stars slit through, static on velvet.
Some of the stars are hard to hear.
Memory begins when the needle lifts.
Silence, or spaces through which dust.
Molecules’ blueprint being.
In a crowd, my right ear becomes a room of its own.
An untouched apple or an open mouth.
Sweat, voices, you could only hear the drawings.
The crumble inside charcoal shaping their hair.
You might whoop down hallways, dash through traffic, or lean against a pillar seeking stone.
Still, ache for an ocean; to float out, to float on.
Inside this room the object is to listen to listening.
Palm, to mouth, to whistle, peace.
The party gathers driftwood in newspaper-aged air.
Because you kept a shell you can say you were there.
The dog pulled away from the shore.
This we call loss because now.
In all “this” time, the shoreline has been drinking and shifts its ribbons.
A tuning fork struck like a turned page.
Pitch, held, until another, and another one.
Stretched, slowly scaling rocks, root growing out of the earth.
It sounds like a tongue, reaching.
Like lifting.
Like a mirror carried forth under sky.
To find oneself is not, after all, singular.
More mist than cloud.
More echo than instant.
— Meg Shevenock