WHAT’S BECOME

In your absence the trees are thick with sap,
catching slugs, amber jewels for our inheritors.
The cones so thin and weak I can eat them.

Everything is strange. Where the sky once met
the garden there’s a wool of yellow smoke.
The sparrow I threw into it did not come back.

The moon will not look at me anymore.
The squirrels hang like fish over the branches
and the birds tunnel deeper into the earth.

In the kitchen: the skull of an orange,
some mites that might have been seeds;
the potatoes, damp mouths, gone to talking.

There is a chalk horse standing in the briar.
Every time he moves he is eliminated.
His ghosts go one by one into the woods.

Even now I look for you in every direction
though my eyes are opals, my hands stones.
I write you: hieroglyphs, shaken from the stem.

If you know I am waiting please come.
It’s been too long since we lived in the brick house
with its white fence and green grass and marigolds.

Maggie Dietz 2003 Writing Fellow

"The Work Center is the best environment for my work. Unlike academic environments, the focus is on my relationship to my own work, and the development of my personal work habits and temperament, not on theory or criteria that interrupt art processes and idiosyncratic ideologies like my own."

Angela Dufresne Second-Year Visual Arts Fellow

"A Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship means freedom and community. It allows me the freedom to explore, play, and grow as a creative individual without constraints and expectations, to fall in love again with my craft, to rigorously challenge myself, to unfurl, to free fall. And I savor the camaraderie formed by the writing and visual arts fellows and the extended community of Provincetown and Cape Cod, the three-mile stretch of sand, shacks and quirky souls edging the gleaming ocean, boundless and open."

Viet Le 2003 Visual Arts Fellow