What’s Right Here
to the 2010 Governor’s Arts Awards Recipients
It’s all right here, they show us, the seemingly invisible
right on the cusp of our peripheral vision,
like the slender moon faded into the late afternoon sky,
ready to come forth once the light vanishes.
All the art that endures is always expanse of horizon
and pantina, letting the layers of what is, what could be,
what could have been, bleed through, whether it’s the life
in film of we could have lived had the Confederates won,
or the deep river call of a single saxophone note that
gathers us out of what we were thinking to who we are.
The coppering of a 1960 Dodge truck, illuminating how
time angles through rust and memory. The dream of
a space open enough to hold children learning to sing together
as well as elders viewing gallery offerings of place and texture.
Or further west, a town where cellos merge with violins upstairs,
a woman calls out “first position” across the street, and
a group of friends paint what’s lost and found around the corner.
Even the years of archiving that story thousands of
working artists, showing us the layers and colors,
shifting risks in singular places, here all along.
Just like one photograph of golden hills, the light against
the curving stretch of grass, lifting up to us what’s right here,
a glimmering world generous with motion, earth and sky,
wishes and breath, ready at any moment to reveal itself
and the art of how to live right here where we’ve landed.
