A raid on the inarticulate

'You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid.'

-TS Eliot, Four Quartets

Blocks of wood and shifting light, Maya Lin's 2 x 4 Landscape is a plea, a paen, an 

elegy.  My father, an engineer, my mother, a director

my cousin, an artist, another cousin, a linguist and her husband, a teacher, circle this hill tent, this elephant in a boa constrictor, this gathering wave of upended two by fours--pitched in Union Station--moving in the moment.

The nominal moment, plastic or potential: The product of a quantity and its distance from a reference point.. for the moment, we lose ourselves and word as reference point.

We are a turning force, rotating around this axis-  50,ooo boards swirling a solar system--words reach escape velocity.

It is all we have, what we can touch, and imagine, and what we've made of it.

Mother leaves to get answers from a local authority. Dad studies the shadows. I think of the liminal again. Where space and substance, inside and outside, text and meaning, walking and falling, meet-- holding each other in perfect equilibrium.