LINDSAY LAUERSDORF POET

A Forest

New National Gallery, Berlin

Without a thought, I walked through clear glass doors

And found myself amid a group of trees,

A forest that had only nails for leaves,

Before a scene of watercolor landscape;

I marveled; It was cold and it was still;

While wandering in and out among the stumps,

I looked intently at each one to find

But nails and wood, with carpet underneath

Fluorescent lights to shine on every piece

This is the place where man creates himself

An exhibition of the emptiness

When one man takes apart a living thing,

And makes it into something he conceived;

I stepped outside into the rain and stood,

and watched the people walking through the street

I thought of all the works I'd ever made

How many men I took apart in words

And made them into something solid, clear

As stagnant sculptures made of black and white,

Left captive for aesthetic eye to judge.

Frost

In winter I have found myself for hours

Entranced here, watching from my windowsill

The tiny crystals form, between the panes

Of frozen glass, crisp shards of morning frost,

Miniscule and intricately shaped,

Like tiny sculptures from the Orient,

I know I could, as impulse drives me to,

Lift the latch, and raise the pane of glass,

To touch them with a child's curious hand;

To understand, dissect, to find a meaning for

the beautiful fragility outside;

Yet as I look, I understand and stay

Content not to contaminate their forms

I wonder, would the eyes of ancient sages,

See geometry and art, would they

Feel the lack of ice formations still

Inside themselves, as I, still long to touch?

To make them an idea, make them mine?

Or would they simply see the drops they are,

As comic, telling as the sculpted ice

Without the need to take them from the pane,

The air, the cold, the wind, the trees, the world.

Perhaps there is an art in self destruction;

A greater being in the single drop

Of liquid running languidly across

My dirt stained fingertip; This melted tear,

Though now exquisite only in the concept,

The thing it was before I interfered;

A greater being than I was before,

Not having realized my own wholeness,

Without the witness of my clumsy hand;

It is the realization of the form

That breeds itself in eyes of ancient men;

That turns the artist's tears to crystal shards,

And pastes them to the windows of the world.