Quicksilver: Terlingua Cemetery, Lyn Belisle
What an extraordinary experience to have a poet look at your work and tell its hidden story back to you with empathy and intuition! Maggie Fitch – friend, potter, poet – just gave me that great honor. You’ll love the poem .. read on.
Here’s how it happened.
One of my artworks is being exhibited in the current GAGA show at the San Antonio Art League + Museum. It is titled Quicksilver: Terlingua Cemetry. I created this fiber art collage (above) as a response to a recent visit to the cemetery in Terlingua just outside Big Bend. The work is comprised of transferred photos on fabric, stitching, fabric scraps, and found objects on stretched canvas. It is 36″ long.
Collage back story: The Chisos Mining Company, was established in 1903 at Terlingua, and during the next three decades became one of the nation’s leading producers of quicksilver (mercury from cinnabar ore). The Terlingua cemetery, iconic and eerie, is a reminder of the miners who died there from mercury poisoning. The average time spent in the mine before mercury poisoning began affecting them was less than 5 years. The men who got sick were happy to have a job for pennies a day, all the while unaware of the horrific nature of their own impending death.
So, Maggie was attending a poetry workshop group at the Art League last week, and their focus was to write an ekphrastic poem, which is an intense poetic description of a a work of art, and to chose a piece from the exhibition Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of the artwork, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning.
Maggie chose to study my piece and looked at it so carefully that she discovered a story that amazed me. These were the first two lines of her poem:
“See here
printed in plain sight a plot of prickly crosses . . .”
She contemplated the details she saw – torn newspaper clippings sewn to tattered fabric, old images of a miner, transferred onto cloth, a frayed portrait of a native child, rusty items and found objects . . .
She saw more than just the history of the place – she felt what it must have been like to be there, perhaps on an August day exactly 100 years ago . . .
She tells us through her poem what to look for, what we can see if we look past the individual scraps and shards to the whole concept of place in time . . .
Read Maggie’s entire poem, below, read it slowly, and I think you will feel how visual art and poetic verse are powerful companions.
Ekphrastic poem by Maggie Fitch
based on a fiber collage by Lyn Belisle:
Quicksilver: Terlingua Cemetery
See here
printed in plain sight a plot of prickly crosses
seen here three ways differently still all the same
remarking the folly of passers-by intending
to go somewhere better
away from a screaming orange sky
then befuddled in twilight’s turquoise caresses
charring intentions into crusty black embers
blown over the graves of those
passing through to somewhere else
See here
stitched little purses of tattered intentions
that should have been quicksilver but not quick enough
passing through with his donkey in the desert that day
the miner gave the young girl a shawl
kindly wrapping her shoulders up warmly that night
she gave him a colorful brand-new bandana
around his neck in the desert that day
passing through with his donkey
enchanted instead by a mouth full of tumbleweed
See here
are the artifacts of tattered intentions
stitched little purses made from what is left
of the shawl and bandana and maybe a donkey’s tooth
shadows of the young girl
and the miner who stayed
enthralled by the spectrum
in Terlingua they stayed
embedded in Quicksilver
See?
This poem gives me shivers – it’s as if Maggie was there in Terlingua that day, watching, seeing it all unfold. It’s beautiful and haunting. I am transported by lines like:
“…away from a screaming orange sky
then befuddled in twilight’s turquoise caresses
charring intentions into crusty black embers
blown over the graves of those
passing through to somewhere else . . .”
Below is a photo of Maggie’s original poem next to the collage she created in the Visual Verses group which is facilitated by poet and artist Marcia Roberts. This group meets once a month at the San Antonio Art League. (If you are interested in learning more about this group, please email Marcia.)
As I said at the start of this post, I told you that Maggie is also and artist who tells stories in clay. Here is an example of Maggie’s own work:
If I were a poet, I would love to look at these two pieces and write an ekphrastic poem about who they are and what their story is. Perhaps the fellow on the right was a miner passing through Terlingua searching for his long-lost daughter?? . . . . .maybe??? See???
Thank you, Maggie, for a wonderful poem. I learned so much. ♥
