The Book of the Month is a collaboration between the Taos Center for the Arts and the Taos Book Arts Group. Each month a new work of art is on display in the Encore Gallery. Artists in the Book Arts Group experiment with a wide range of readily available materials and simple techniques to develop creative narratives. Sometimes they bear little resemblance to the codex book form that is most familiar to all of us, yet they share with all books sequence and narrative.

My book is titled “Plaza Blanca: House of Cards”. It is a piece about the White Place, or Plaza Blanca, in Abiquiu and is based on a child’s game, “A House of Cards.” I see it in relation to the White Place and the way it is always eroding and changing, how portions of the cliff fall down, rocks weather, and water carves out the arroyos. It is never the same from one season to the next.

I started with two large ink drawings done on site at Plaza Blanca. I then wrote the text of a poem entitled ‘Echo Amphitheater’ by Renee Gregorio on the back. I cut the drawings into 72 cards, ran them through a laminator and then cut slots in them. They can be assembled in an infinite number of ways. There is no right or wrong structure.

ECHO AMPHITHEATER by Renee Gregorio

Water marks spill down the rock face,

deep red on pale orange, spidery dried blood.

This theater’s a bowl of sound,

a ship of air.  The horizon’s upward: a wave-

cloud through blue, trees erupting from stone,

the earth’s boundaries raw, untenable.

 

All voice is an echo, all sound a stoney return.

Too many shouting at once ends in babble,

the obscure danger behind a siren’s wail.

Short, sharp sounds echo best, the sign says.

A leaf’s softer turning doesn’t reverberate.

Here’s a stage for word’s re-making.

An unoriginal theater giving back

piercing sounds, the brief masks of voice.

 

"House of Cards: Plaza Blanca"

Sticks, paper, ink H. W. L.

This hanging sculpture was exhibited in Odes & Offerings, curated by Joan Logghe as a collaboration between visual artists and poets, at the Santa Fe Community Gallery, from March 23 – June 8, 2012.    I have been interested in hanging boats for a long time and find the following quote from Jeroen van Westen very resonant…”The suspended boat is a symbol of putting your life in the hands of the great unknown, a force that has purpose and meaning beyond our personal understanding.”

The poem I worked with “Our New Life” by Carol Moldaw.

If the field is thick

with horse shit and the garden

unplanted, and the roof

needs repair; if after the next storm

sand from the acequia

overflows and suffocates the marsh,

killing the cattails where redwinged blackbirds nest,

if the neighbors’ horses overgraze our field,

if I am lonely,

if a WIPP truck overturns

going back and forth from Los Alamos

to the shifting salt pits in Carlsbad,

if we go away for a week

and miss the crab apple’s blossoming,

the sheep shearing,

if it turns out I am allergic to Russian olives,

to chamisa, to rabbit grass,

if they pave our dirt road,

if the cat returns to her original owner,

if the walls need remudding after every storm,

if the doctor finds a problem,

if the beer cans and corn chip bags and whiskey bottles

pile up on the road

faster than we can collect them for the dump,

if the doctor doesn’t know what is wrong,

if Los Alamos gets the contract

to manufacture or stockpile or do anything whatever

with nuclear warheads,

if I cut my foot on a rusty washing machine part

while walking down by the river,

if I get lost in the Barrancas,

if my heart keeps shrinking,

if my heart explodes–

will I ever again think to look

for the new moon’s thinnest crescent,

will we ever crane our necks together,

as we used to, name the stars,

turn down the cool sheets,

go to bed not exhausted,

arms linked in one constellation

that turns all night in sync with the sky?