PRAXIS

Katie Robinson
2021

reflection and action need, desire, and crave one another. reflection and action need, desire, and crave one another. it can be seen in terms of a build up and release of energy. despair is at the other end of a lot of reflection and no action.

I am longing
 
   to print years
   of photos
   of my life
   since my mom died 7 years ago
 
I want her to know
what has happened
it presses me
I want to show her
what shape I am
after everything that doesn’t seem to end
 
the burning and the being born
the transformation of breath we all must swallow
our home carving itself deeper inside without knowing what it will find
 
the shape of a heart that is one muscle coiled in on itself, twisting and untwisting
as it gives and receives
it is nothing like a pump
it has no pit
nothing about a heart will break your tooth 
if you bite down on it
 
potential giving itself itself
pressing down into pressing
an impression of an empty pocket
the way a clay pot is shaped by plans of intimacy with what typically falls through
this is a language dissection does not speak
 
   there is nothing solid about it
 
there are no photos of me
following the natural cleavage down and around
rubbing away with my thumbs the tendons and laced layers of fascia
unwringing the tight twisted bulb in three turns
 
still
what I have I want to offer to her
somehow
I show the not-photos (the negatives?) to other people
and it doesn’t quite do the job
 
my jerky smiles swap parables with prints
that develop themselves right next to me
hot   burning even
  still not solid
 
   If I swim the distance between spinning and twisting
will I learn to go back and forth 7 years through shape?
and will it be enough to have learned?
 
I dream of delivering green algae water
wet knotted milfoil prints
and myself
  to the portal at north end of Wita Topa Bde* Lake of The Isles
    I dream of greeting the coiled serpent dragon
      up close and unstable
        who guards the passage
          (we greet by winking)
            I notice its one huge eye spinning slowly theturningearth to keep the lake afloat
               the other eye
              still
      tell me
        what is it I need to bring
           what proof
                           what stone
          what must I swallow or knit into a single band
       to know she knows everything that’s happened here?

* Marlena Myles and Dawí    https://marlenamyl.es/project/dakota-land-map/