MARK HARRIS, FEATURED IN THE NEW OCEAN STATE REVIEW

Metasequoia

From a roomful of things
on view, the view

cone of quiet
leaf-light and shadow.

Dawn—that’s a specimen tree—
draw a line

tangent to the broadest branch
there

You and I col-
lapse, glass divides air

bud, scar, bract, mouth, eye
decohere.

We collect ourselves.

My poem “Metasequoia” came out of moments accumulated over years in a room with art situated on walls and pedestals, all of which I moved and installed at one time or another. In a place devoted to gazes, can any one of them be true? Partition walls were modular, rearranged according to a curator’s wishes, and the color scheme frequently changed. Early on, I was often asked to roll a wall with subtly different hues of paint for the director to consider, a likely task for a young artist who was constantly searching. Well okay, directionless. I’d lucked into a job at the museum and stayed because creative work at decent pay is scarce. Also, I fell for a coworker. Love, for real. When you know an architecture by heart, do you start to feel surroundings as much as see them? It’s true for me; they enter the body in a way. With all the hangs and rehangs of that space, it’s hard to recreate one without inserting elements of others. If our memories change in the act of recalling, then so do we, right? About the tree: outside a tall window grew a dawn redwood brought back from China in the 1940s. Metasequoia. On busy days, its protective presence was like a sanctuary. I say was—the tree is still there, unlike everything else. I’m in a different line of work. The art is in storage. The museum was torn down to make way for a new one. A steel skeleton is rising in its place and receiving a skin. The old membrane, we’re told, was faulty, permeable. It let the outside in.

Mark Harris is a writer, editor, and book designer. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Blazing Stadium, Bones, The Hopkins Review, Ocean State Review, Shearsman, The Elephants, Noon: An Anthology of Short Poems (Isobar), Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (W.W. Norton), and a wide range of other publications. The Other Other, a booklet pairing the poem “Nocturnal” with paintings by Keith Crowley, reprises a collaborative gallery exhibition. His book of poems Burl (RMP) is in a second printing. In 2014 he founded Ornithopter Press, an independent publisher of poetry.