by Elizabeth Sultzer

Geodesic folds reverberating outwards and back, a math
explosion onto a white which holds the meaning of crisp.
It is the production of subjectivity, dripping infinitesimal color, speckles
accumulating to a small, critical mass.
Amorphic, ovular dark holes, tone-full, both finished and in progress,
shown upright for your inquisitive
viewing nature pleasure.
Here are inimitable results paired with a process so deliberate
so direct as to be [nearly] immediately known: an
automated mechanism lets out a small drop of ink every hour or so, onto
blank paper either folded or curved, static or undulating: just
enough hand to make it his.
I’d like to think the whole thing is mimicking us, gently, in our countless
drops of experience
pain lust anger hope loss,
ups and downs,
trickling unmolested down onto a paper life, which sucks it all in,
spreading and
echoing to our outer reaches, traces expanding and
deepening [our multiplicities,] our worlds.
Paper love.
There’s no gray here, only the bare minimum construction and exponential
progress, the turtle in a hare’s race of contemporary—
wait, painting? Process.
It’s nature with her cogs exposed, ticking away the hours until
all we have is the aesthetically beautiful aftermath. Which is which.
You can’t draw real entropy, but here it is squeezed with gravity and
a battery.

 
The smudges would be burnt if they weren’t so wet—
yielding to a metronome reminder of our own liquidity.
Easily lost as it is layered, dried by its own atmosphere.
Days are just drops in the river, in a second it comes in waves,
nurturing and destroying us, only to be beat back,
retreating after crests, its foam dissipating to lonely, disquieting calm.
So much water to be lost within, as if we imagined it all.
As if we forgot.