The Brooklyn Rail

Butterly at the Tang

—for Kathy Butterly

They’re so alluring, he said. So alluring, she answered, they unsettle me.
Like volumes of stained glass sagging in the rose window of a Gothic church.

Or an augury, she said. I find myself not taking them in as objects so much
as experiencing their infectious emotional fillip. And our complicity, he added.

Maybe like some freaky collision between funk wit and knock-out elegance?
No, he thought, like a wrestling match between desire and extinction.

It’s as though their intelligence, she said, is a secrecy rather than a narrative.
Those outer folds give life to the shape. But inside each sculpture,

There’s space for imagination, for a darkness
plunging into dimensions uncontained by the form.

Magisterial ruins, he said. How else would you describe them?
I was thinking of the Hanunóo who live in an island rainforest

but have just four words for color: wet, dry, light, and dark, a spectrum
they refine with impressions of strength or weakness.

Is there a word for something small in scale, but enormous in presence?
He was trying to remember. You mean like fragments from Sappho?

It’s as though she kneads decoration with distortion and out pops magnitude.
That’s the word, he said.

Yes, she answered, but the magnitude isn’t masculine, it’s not Serra.
Doesn’t it function more as an invitation to intimacy? Half-birthed, collapsing,

regenerating, the vases are queenly, tempered with self-possession and control
at the same time they’re vulnerable, wounded, buckling in on themselves.

This one, for instance, she pointed to Sagittarius A. What do we see
from right here? Tiny beads at the neckline of a collar which rests

on two rounded protrusions uncoupled by a cleft
suggesting buttocks. Yet from any other angle, no such suggestion occurs.

Righto, he said. The encounters she offers up aren’t ever enclosed in one perspective.
He said, Homer calls this color Tyrian purple. But check out her glaze list:

Stardust matte, heat wave, crystal orange, camellia pink, cognac, matador
red, froth lava lavender, Scandia blue, lime parfait, Castilian avocado.

He said, I hear she fires and fires again, judging the weight of one glaze
against another. To find out how, cheek to cheek, the colors tango. It’s all

juxtaposition, isn’t it, a grammar of textures, translucencies, opacities, the copper
generating blue and blue-green, interacting with lead in a flux

that lowers the melting point, and cadmium boosting those vibrant reds.
Instead of reinforcing line, she countered, her colors set their own boundaries.

And there’s no final effect, really. It’s ongoing. The feelings they emanate
keep lugging along dozens of lambent, allusive meanings.

What I never noticed before, mused a man standing alone in a baggy suit,
is how in the company of other colors, the personality of a color changes.

Looks like ice cream, said a boy. His sister: You think everything looks like ice cream.