Quillen's "Slip" (poem version)

It sensed my face,
knew I watched spellbound by
its confusion—its pain,
absorbed and defining a nightmare existence.

“Slip,” a fiberglass sculpture
shaped like an engorged “S”
through a looking glass . . .
Eyes blinking top and bottom,
vulgar vertical lips breathing sighs,
uttering sounds
almost inaudible,
almost sensual,
always searching.

“Wow-wow; low, low, low, low.
Oh no! Oh no! Where did you go?”
gave form and measure—
meaning to its multimodal essence,
across the museum:
Grieving, foreboding, apocalyptic.

Maria listened—
no eyes, mouth, nostrils—just
Skin draped with cascading black hair.
Unpainted, like an unfinished manikin
on canvass,
Maria could only imagine how
“Slip” appealed to all senses.
Like an abstract conversationalists,
they communicate.


Sterling Warner
Summer 2009