I have just come from gazing into eight rectangles of sky. By moving from mirror to mirror laid out in a courtyard, I have been able to take the trees with me. The clouds follow, floating across the little gaps between each panel. The artist of the mirrors has understood our strange fascination in lifting part of the world away from itself and holding it in the glass: the branches carrying on their own dark, mysterious lives below us, the wind shifting above us and under us at the same time.
These mirrors were part of an art show at a community college in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The talent involved the compulsion to buy eight old department store mirrors before they were demolished, the patience in arranging them in the right place and at the right level, and the passionate desire to hold the winds in the glass for a while, to turn the world aslant and love it at a slightly different angle.
The artist of these mirrors understands poetry. This is to introduce the poems of Pamela Perkins Atkinson. In her writing Pamela attempts to render not only the details of the world, but their magic as well. As she does with her mirrors, she turns the flat surface of paper mysterious and alive with trees and water and snakes.
— Chris Bursk
Night Tides
Summer nights are different; they have another dark. Spread your attention to your perimeters, as a karate master widens his stare, fanning his vision to awareness of the whole of his eyes’ space. Don’t focus; just spread your net of feeling until its corners meet behind you. Now you can sense how the walls are less there than they are in winter; the way the windows are loose, wide gates. The roof doesn’t seal you down, but hovers, not touching the walls. The night tides slide into the light cones of your house and out again, like a black, invisible stream sliding out of darkness into the light of a bridge’s lamps, its surface wavered with gleams, and then sliding silkily under the bridge’s dark again. So the dark enters your house: scented with screens, impalpably powdered with the wings of thumping moths, and rising.
The Shape Of Water
It’s so hard to see the shape of water. Stretch out on a sun-roughened dock, head hanging over, chin pressed against the splinters, and try to take the shape with your eye. Down there, just past the creosote-scented shadows surging hollowly under the dock, just past your fingers, the glassy, angled water tilts against the pilings: a slow lift and suck, and murmuring wet lipping. You can try to hold, to clamp the shapes in your mind, wrinkling your forehead, feeling the sun bring out prickles of sweat on the back of your head under your warm hair, but those surface loops and ovals shift and bonelessly break into french curves that escape precise memory. They sea-change your own reflection, your tipped down head, your reaching hand, into curves that flash, into rocking, shifting mirrors.
Cold Afternoon At The Edge Of The Wood
Rhododendrons clenching their leaves into double-rolled scrolls; honeysuckle lapping its leaves one over the other, and, perforce silent, sitting in a stilled, darkened tremor of grey-green cold. Their dun, subsonic shudder is only felt if touched. Feel it? Yes? If we four could hold hands . . . honeysuckle and you, rhododendron and I . . . in that level of life past the differences of plant and animal; if you and I could dull our blood to their quenched seeping we could shudder together; we could shake out our senses to the thinness of the air, dim them down like the waning of this winter afternoon to a barely heard stretched endurance of cold.
“International Annual Collection: Prize Winning Photographs”
— a hospital in India —
Then a photograph of a child in an iron crib, gaunt, with chopped dark hair in black spikes on the sheet. Her eyes are open and endlessly grieved; she seems to have ceased to try to protest her pain. Her mouth, which had opened for hurting, is a little to one side; her outflung arm is thin; the elbow is the largest part. A woman leans above her with the look that shows long practice at holding anguish squeezed down to the size of regret. She raises the sheet to cover the open mouth, the fixed uncomprehending eyes.
