Mathew Weitman
Art by Janet Biggs
Janet Biggs, still from the video A Step on the Sun, 2012. Single channel HD video with sound.
Courtesy of the artist, Cristin Tierney Gallery, Galerie Analix Forever, and CONNERSMITH gallery.
The Counterworld
The monks who keep the void clean
begin by sweeping up the many rivers
& undoing all the trees
The easiest way to catch a hawk
explains the ancient abbot
is to remove the branches sky & fields of mice
Each thing goes
& along with it
goes each thing
How long have I lived
as a man resigned
to finding the counterworld
of this abyss
How long have I stood
watching the brooms
& sleeves of monks
for any sleight of hand
How long have I searched
the parallels of nothingness
for coyotes howling for sex
on a frozen lake
Somewhere there is a closet
full of blue whales
& the breath of flies
or an under-the-bed
where the trails we rode yesterday
are still wet with horse-piss
Somewhere there is a rug
that cannot hide
beneath itself
Janet Biggs, still from the video A Step on the Sun, 2012. Single channel HD video with sound.
Courtesy of the artist, Cristin Tierney Gallery, Galerie Analix Forever, and CONNERSMITH gallery.
The Potter’s Field
Not to dig for but to bury
abstractions: a field is
not as empty as its surface
when the crowded earth beneath it
makes each seed dour: the body
happens & goes away
Calamus propagates in the eye
socket of a ruined head to bloom
in thickets where gales tangle:
wind-songs made from paupers’ brows
Columbines germinate in mouths
& root in ribs to draw water from a lung
stony petals: each pistil rises
from a heap of selves
I’ve slept outside & felt
the frames that feed a meadow
The heart wants to become soil & nothing
else: a bone dreams of softening to dirt
shoulders to let a lily
& knuckles a blade of grass
Janet Biggs, still from the video Fade to White, 2010. Single channel HD video with sound.
Courtesy of the artist, Cristin Tierney Gallery, Galerie Analix Forever, and CONNERSMITH gallery.
Short Answer
Or if instead to piece together
the arc of your unbeing
& frame it as a test
rather than a gesture towards an absence
As if to ask which vapors hung around
the farmers market yesterday before becoming clouds
your warmth dissipates from a chair
Forgive me
I would fail this test
the textbook I am using was my father’s
whose marginalia is lost on me
as he has read & referenced a great number
of burned books
I move a pen because I miss you
In a poem without squirrels
my father has scrawled beneath a photograph
of moon phases you are organizing the drugs
Understand I am unfamiliar
with most processes happening around me
am often confused by such things as sand
dollars & petrified wood
Mathew Weitman
Mathew Weitman is a Brooklyn-based poet, musician, and writer. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Southwest Review, New South, LIT, Unbroken, and more. He received his MFA from The New School and releases original music under the monikers Hotels on Mars and Sqwks.
Janet Biggs
Janet Biggs is an interdisciplinary artist known for her immersive work in video, film and performance. Biggs’s work focuses on individuals in extreme landscapes or situations, navigating the territory between art, science and technology. Biggs has collaborated with nuclear physicists, neuroscientists, Arctic explorers, a robot named Shimon, and recently sent a project to the International Space Station as part of MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative.