Spilled milk, broken dishes

Mike,

I was intrigued by the back story you shared about the images you created in response to DeFlitch’s poem November. I love your idea of taking slices of images and sequencing those along with text variations to arrive at a final work. That the journey involves scanning prints, taking slices, sequencing them, printing the sequence then transferring that image to a paper matrix and overprinting text emblems the final piece with a rich, unique history.

DeFlitch’s poem evoked for me a feeling of keeping vigil for the weakening daylight as the winter solstice approaches. Over the years we experience this phenomenon differently, and in each subsequent year the experience becomes richer and richer as we reflect back. Your process for making your images captures that same richness. As she has in other poems, DeFlitch follows the introspective moment of the poem’s beginning with a harsh slap of the unexpected - here it’s the reminder that at any time the shock of a sudden death can hit us without warning.

Somehow I went from “November” to Longley’s poem “Broken Dishes”, probably because this poem begins with the description of his friend Sydney keeping vigil for the waning days of a dear mutual friend’s life.

This poem begins much like DeFlitch’s “November” - vigil is kept, comfort is sought and given in the face of the approaching darkness - here the end of a life rather than the end of the daylight at the winter solstice. The unexpected thing that follows is not as shocking as it is in Deflitch’s poem, but it does raise an interesting question.

Longley admires Sydney’s devotion, kneeling on the bare hospital floor, repeating phrases meant to comfort their dying friend the way we find bodily comfort in “…blankets and eiderdown and sheets”. This observation is followed by Longley’s desire to ease Sydney’s discomfort not with a generic rug or mat but by a very specific object - a Broken Dishes quilt. You can feel how the specificity of this object is as much of a surprise to Longley as it is to us. I think this line perfectly captures the sense of the unreal we all feel about the odd thoughts or images that pop into our minds at moments like these.

Here’s the vandyke brown print I made in response to this poem.

Seeing the “quilt” of bracken on the ground in this clearing made me think immediately of the poem and that push/pull between comfort/discomfort.

Full disclosure: I wrote my list of words out after making this image but without referring to it.