In memory of Judy Heckert Woehr

     Apotheosis

Black scape
Occupies space
on my wall
In my head
a door which is
itself
a doorless room
the mysterious whole
mysterious severed parts
come together
to hold nothing
but itself.
Tangibility
In my head - ideas
images
seethe around
it's black edges
compelling me
to turn away.
I think of structures
their particular
rhythm
of destruction and renewal -
An apogee of atoms
tightly contained here
as a moment is held
solid it time
and at the last
totally grasped.

    Barbara Sturgell
    February, 1973, Austin, Texas

    In response to a piece of art I created, an assemblage named Apotheosis

Lovers

     My excited ideas carry me away to a place where my presence in you is eternally presupposed, where we first met, where the simplest of seeds, just a transparent offering of your eyes into mine - moist fecund penetration of shameless desire and receptiveness, took root. And what grows now in this ground through our common experience is a yet young growth seen through rapidly evolving configurations tumbling cataclysmicly in turmoil about each other in a kind of spontaneity, like an ever changing yet never changing waterfall of thought and emotional textures, like light playing on light in the abyss, like colliding stars; ecstatic revelations of the silent blackness behind that common nothingness around which our gazing into each others eyes plays like solar flares, and which alone could support my perpetual falling, falling, falling, falling, and simultaneously reflect, reflect, reflect, reflect, our faces back and forth to each other in an infinite regress of images metamorphosing into worlds of subtlety in infinite regress.

     Finally, hovering on the abyss, I am just a benumbed butterfly in the winter wind, chasing you, a fallen leaf blown into a fluttering enticement.

     Potentiality is to actuality as meaning is to purpose as love is to joining. As you are to me as I am to you. We are the same, only the perspective is different. I confer individuality. You confer universality.