Caught, and Ministry of Ostriches

Caught

after Modern Gestures:
Abraham Walkowitz Draws Isadora Duncan

The artist’s hands made her five thousand times.They moved as fast as her feet, releasedthe kinetic into the falling pulse-beat of charcoal

on paper, caught falls poised over surfaces.His fingers grasped at her movements, wrote,Her body was music. It was a body electric.

Even her stillness pulsed, crackled on the page:hands raised overhead, as if asking to be releasedfrom the very body she made earthly with motion,

her throat lifted for sacrifice, hoveringfrom a heavenward gaze. Her heartbeatand breath returned in his drawn timelines.

Notes, words, lines: all that captures her dynamicrenderings are these still shots of the beatof a bird’s wings. He tried to capture flight, motion

in still lifes. The trembling body suspendedwith watercolor stains, waiting to be releasedfrom the confines of time. Caught in line.

Ministry of Ostriches

It’s hard to tell if all the tresses are takenfrom horse, human, sheep, bird, yak

or buffalo. The part like an even hem,stitched. All dyed an apricot shade,

a golden hue, bleached white, stainednight-black with an edge of Persian blue.

A cake of scented wax was once thoughtto cool you as it melted over the surface

of your hot hat of hair. The risk? A blessingcould stick to the fibers and leave you

more a sinner than when you had shornyour scalp bare in adulterous affairs.

It’s not just that vanity is a cultural play:At heart a wig holds in its build the act

of sacrifice—all that hair removed at costto be what someone else’s fingers ran through.

There must have been a queen somewhere whoshaved her rival’s head and wore the curls in

triumph. She quickly learned that wearingother peoples’s blessings was a curse.

To wear another’s love is to be a wolfdressed as a lamb to slaughter. Surely

everyone knows a horse or a child will yankoff your airs and see you as bare and fuzzy

as an ostrich, mouth open, declaring ithas got nothing to hide in open court.