Magnum Opus: A Wish Upon Art That Startles

nnadi samuel

I glass blow the length of my loin into rough shapes,
ingest the elastic breeze till I could make a home of air.
I was born passive, yet actionable at will.

I know the simple wonder of stretching to thaw the abyss of my frozen wants,
know all the ways to stay upturned as a wallet, 
& straighten back—tidy as a dollar note.

I've learnt to sell the shape of my body to the fire’s spark:
oxygen & fuel—force-fed into malleable flesh.
& say I stay land-thirsty, a thousand pigments would marry my curves.

say, my being alive thrives on the ignorance that I exist,
on how much bending my groin withstands—I shall surprise myself with elasticity,
kill my flesh in fancy chlorine, on the altar of longing,

of laying still & poking distance.
& say, a crack doesn’t end me, I would happen as a masterpiece:

how in the year of dwarfs, Dale designed the towering 40-feet garden: a tall instruction.
stone-fired glass of plain decor. the tendrils of plants scanning the atmosphere.

a tourist bewrites it in words,
calls the plant inanimate copse in animated body—for how it feigns lifelessness, 
before imploding as leaves within the laminated glass: 
a scenario that won’t stop shedding.

Pa documents its behavior. the impulse leaves everyone hand-in-the-mouth.
even Dale must have wished upon art that startles.

I play out these scenery till I unlove Dale,
unlove flowers for her lavish skin & rare costume.
our reaction is more accident than surprise:
a call to stretch—in the way you can’t differentiate us from the flower.

light fails the plant & it begins to decay.
art-curious—we delve into transplant, 
slacken its stem above a nursery till it loses its green.

the kindness generates neon trees, enough to power an estate.
we surround the electricity, wire our skin to charge at whatever torches.

I sell myself to this narrative, held my breath this long 
to account for the cutthroat art & its murderous tendencies.

I came into the world—womb-tearing.
can tell the shame in being lab rat for light’s bending antics,
the experts that earn a living at the spot of my butchering.

twice, I was contracted to act as specimen condemned to a looking glass.
I failed all through the auditioning. I am no species for disaster.

I rebuke the words to scale boundaries,
if the mere mention of longing brings a shiver:
the kind to straighten your body into alertness.

study shows: whatever living thing that does not cross-pollinate goes extinct,
& I ransack my loin for stigma.

I beat myself into fertility, soft as loam, soft as molten glass.
I started this poem, confined to an elevator.
everything headed somewhere, except for the mirror laminating us to the wall.

light fails us yet again, & we tiptoe into position—clawing for help.
imagine it does not come, 
would we be any different from the plant?

______

NB:
Dale Chihuly is an American glass artist extraordinaire, who studied the ancient art of glassblowing. He also built the Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum which opened at the Seattle Center in 2012.