Sunrise is a prayer
I wake inside consecutive nights to Jupiter,
glowing blue above a Los Angeles freeway
Remembering feels sharper now.
These days, I think more concretely under what presses.
I want my body to be heard in what I offer
My car etches a repeated line from the city to the desert,
to where the land quiets and the sky fills
I want to hear something delivered from deep within the earth
I wait in still moments, light and dark, for what arrives
I walk an emptied ocean floor, aimless—
under stars, sun,
clouds, strewn
The kitten frenzied, chases his own tail
bathed in orange light, an open question
Mouth wet, teeth new
The plants drink thirstily the hot dry day
Water lurches from the faucet—
Miraculous
My father told me:
When you look into the eyes of a cat, you see yourself
When you stare upon a mountain, you gaze into a mirror
When you look at another person, you see your reflection
When I look out on the horizon, I see hope.
If all consciousness is God,
there’s no room for stature,
just offerings
We splinter because heavy forces want distance
Yet, I think we ache the same and hear each other's thoughts, fears
images, sounds, objects, conjurings
The enduring conversation perseveres
What is made proliferates, settles
Seeds cast to wind
A child’s dance with a flower
Fragments scattered
By breath, by hands
Time and places touch
And the sun retreats from one sky for another
A lamp lit elsewhere
Then we sleep;
Humbled by our joint need for rest
We tumble into beginning again
—Zoe Koke
Along the rungs of detachment, ascent and return lead to true nature. In a photo of the artist as a child she’s guided between sisters’ hands. Lead by careful grips they mind the ground as she looks up from under yellow bangs toward the adult behind the camera. “If the eye were not sun-like, how could it behold the light?” (1) Open receptors to living currents, belonging wherever beauty is witnessed, like the porous attention of animals.
A bird sings in the face of an ambivalent, salt-bitten earth. Sincere, attuned, often dismissed as naïve, its call erodes self-righteousness, emptying domination and cynicism. At the song’s horizon we’re left to wade in infinite presence—to reconcile tomorrow as hopeful promise and shared fate. Blue Sky and Yellow Sunflower (2): paintings, drawings, photography, sculpture, are evidence of such.
Bed is the studio, meditation is the studio, solitude is the studio, kitchen table is the studio, music is the studio, road is the studio, friendship is the studio, light is the studio, detritus is the studio, walking is the studio, waiting is the studio, reading is the studio, desert is the studio, studio is the studio, sensation is the studio
1.Goethe, Zahme Xenien, 1796
2.Song by Susumu Yokota, 2004
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