Uncle
Bud and Seed Sculptures, Richmond, Virginia, USA. Visited January 16, 2023
I pay attention to these sculptures for the first time, these sculptures I’ve passed at least one hundred times in five years. I stop and stare at these unremarkable sculptures because they happen to be there when my anguish needs something to hold.
I left the apartment in a hurry-scurry, walked along the bike path under the railroad tracks, the briskest pace I could muster, all but jogging, so to burn off the unstructured restlessness of grief.
I get to the door to the flood wall — in other words, not very far at all — when I hear my soul laugh and cry out, “You darling fool. Nobody can outdistance what they carry with them.” Body chock-full of rumpus, I sit on the stone bench dedicated to the memory of CARL WILLIAM ARMSTRONG.
And then I have no energy at all. I could fall asleep here. I am a bucketful of grief, too heavy to tip and drain. I suppose I’ll wait until it evaporates. In the meantime, these sculptures distract from the heartache, this uninspired trio of metallic forms suggesting flower buds, stems, seed pods.
Like flowers, they lean, droop, wave, hang, sag. The sun sets and the angles of light create harsh, distinct, shadows on the ground.
The shadows are more interesting than the sculptures. When the sun moves, they move. They shift when the sun shifts. Eventually they disappear.
The sculptures remain. Unlike flowers, they never sway or squirm. They never experience hunger, never feed on the sun. They never blossom. They change, but too slow to matter. Maybe one hundred years from now patches of rust will mar their surfaces.
Fuck these sculptures and all the meaningless, pointless, so-called works of art about which nobody gives two shits until a smoldering poet bestows on them an inextricable significance. When I think of you, PATRICK WALLACE, I’ll remember this day and the joggers and cyclists who passed between me and these sculptures, everybody bound somehow to one another in ways at the same time deliberate and accidental.