I Left My Wings on a Chair

At The Nasher Sculpture Garden

17 a t t h e n a s h e r s C U L P t U r e g a r D e n From here your arm is a train wheel, she said. Look at me now, he said, and she walked his changing perimeter—black with head scooped out, soldier with helmet and marching arm up, animal aiming its snout, machine. Look at me, and she was slim, erect, limb buds lifted in dignity or protection. The fight sanded me clean, look how reflective I am. How smooth where my mouth used to be. Then he was the fight, black torso with horns, moving chess pieces, one his wife and queen, his head angled down toward her, mouth an o. he jumped to the floor, a wide stance, a full bull, arms high in triumph. he said, Sometimes my arrogance. Once my father. she said, Listen. he could hear the curved wire clicks, the way the slightest brush moved her mobile arms, long and touching like nerves, her hands black metal like flattened drops of tar. she was held together with loops and s clips. In winter? he asked and she said, Then, this. Iron woman, heart encased. heavy with a vast, open abdomen. I see where you hold the sounds, he said. he said, There is the woman made of ducts, origami hands folded in prayer beneath an empty head, black shade in her corrugation. Look how her eyes are strangely closed, ears square. You may become her. I fear my loneliness. she did not understand. Like this, he said, and he was hundreds of metal sticks, t’s held together in terrible stillness, like a photograph of a tornado, chaos and buzzing. she circled him until the sun was behind, shining in. Ah! You are a man inside, she said. Your core is solid, though you are dangerous to touch. Then he said, My work, and he joined a row of headless bodies standing in a strip of sand, arms down, clothes plastered to them in shreds. They had no backs, only hollow facades casting complete shadows. she started to cry. At work I, she said, and she was giant like a myth, over the flowering trees. her heart was a motor, electric cable running along her leg like a sciatic nerve. her arm and hammer swung up and down with the motor’s drone. Go inside, he coaxed, and they stepped down into the chamber and leaned their backs on the recessed granite wall. The square hole in the ceiling framed the sky. I will be the aperture, he whispered, if you will 18 be the sky. They sat by the reflecting pool leaning against one another, mottled and bronzy, their surfaces glinting like the water. They tried being two slabs, the texture of clay. she lifted him. he opened his mouth to reveal the sky. she opened hers to the water. We are more than what we are, he said. Before they left, they were a lawn of black geometries. The sun brightened some edges. No one could see us in the dark, she said. ...