Clay in Our Hair
If I had a thread for every person who said they wanted to support my art and never did,
I could weave an entire tapestry
(that no one would buy).
In my need to survive, I question:
Do I confuse love with support for my art?
Can you LOVE both the artist AND what the artist makes?
Do you have the resources for both?
Can you share my post on your story?
Come to my show?
Tell me how my poem makes you feel?
I always prefer that people choose me, the creator, over what I create.
Sure, those who can afford to support my art can have a little piece for themselves,
and those who can afford to love me get the whole person for free.
A molding clay sculpture was one of the first things I remember making—
it wasn’t air dry clay or earthen clay,
it was something that one could shape and reshape and shape again.
One evening, I sculpted an old steam engine for a train.
I remember the frustration of making large wheels round enough to roll.
Before bed, I placed it on my bedside table, satisfied.
Maybe I’d re-shape it in my dreams…
The next morning my head was off-balance,
something tugging on my scalp.
I found the clay sculpture smashed into my hair
on the crown of my head.
In the mirror, its wheels were no longer recognizable—
demolished by my skull while I slept.
That was the first time something I created
re-became a part of me.
Sometimes my art begins like a mess of clay in my hair—
without the time or tools to comb it out,
I opt to shave my head bald on the stone table, call it:
“performance art.”
The fine blonde hair on my adolescent head
never felt like mine to begin with—
it was the first thing I made without even trying
but that I was willing to give away.
Everyone had their own feelings to share about it,
that I should “never dye or cut it”
or the more threatening approach,
“ugh I wish I had your hair!”
Hold me down and take it then!
Cut it off of me if you want it!
I can grow it and grow it and grow it again.
When I am older, it will be the color of a prairie you tilled too often,
and I will keep it shaved short to spite you.
Then, I was truly hungry for learning,
but I know now that I like to learn from the world at my own pace:
like the lesson you learn when you’re small
and squatted down and you see the group of ants
lift something much larger than any one of them could carry alone.
I want my art to be strong like that…
many legs working together
to make a heavy load seem much lighter.
Art a vessel
for things we cannot measure,
weigh, or
carry alone.
We fill it with what we must,
and if we are lucky, we carry it with us
to a place where it can feed us for the days or years to come.
I have studied so many artists whose art was discovered once they died.
I wonder how much more support would have kept them alive?
Like, having a wealthy patron just in time?
Or a friend who reads what they wrote and without hesitating, hugs them and also cries?
How sad to die among your vessels without anyone asking you what is inside…
Someone will come along when you’re gone
and tell the future artists what they meant the whole time.
Right here, I am dying
and leaving so many things behind.
Please leave a copy of the anthology with my name on my gravestone,
if I remain enough to have one.
By then, death will be a return
to the threads of deep knowing that have always been inside me:
an ancient poetess with the words for a feeling remembered across centuries—
a physicist who knows that gravity
is not just a mysterious force acting upon us
again and again and again—
All that breaking matter down into quarks
and words always remain a similar mass;
their energy never created or destroyed.
Some days, just a few words are strong enough to hold me up;
fibrous syllables wound into that tapestry
someone will never even see, let alone buy.
Friend, I don’t need your money.
Do you hear me?
Do you feel the way I feel sometimes?
My body is the neutron that splits our atom—
you and I comb these clay words from our hair;
Let’s be whole and create a universe together, all at once;
but, we can’t do it if we never get to touch.
