More than Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Sculpture by John Noelke
This was written by my aunt’s brother for the dedication of his statue, The Angelas, in San Angelo, Texas earlier this month. It was inspired by Wallace Stevens’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.
More than Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Sculpture
By John Noelke
1. Two women walk side by side in the pasture, looking.
2. Two blades of grass stand in the wind. Prevailing, perennial.
3. Women, more than one, advance toward equality with certainty. I wouldn’t underestimate them.
4. A culture travels through crushing hardships then and now. Right now, with dignity, with grace, with generosity, with warmth. She has made it to here. She has further to go.
5. A woman far away in 15th century Italy has a sister die. She has a single vision of a procession of women. She begins to educate young women in their homes, in this world. She builds a movement.
6. Movement.
7. The namesake of the city, Carolina Angela de la Garza DeWitt, finally arrives here in person to stand tall for her culture, for women, for untold stories, for recognition long overdue. Of the two, she is the stronger.
8. A woman dies in a car accident on a highway outside Mertzon. Her story is here.
9. The woman who made the difference in your life—it’s her hands, her cotton dress, her smell, her thinking of you. You thinking of her.
10. A young woman with little physical means has a dream of a life that sings. She looks across that river.
11. A woman’s voice pushes off her back foot. Much depends on that back foot.
12. Two nine foot hearts.
13. Flowing molten bronze resolve.
14. Eva Conzuela Tucker, in a classroom.
15. Olga Munoz. Christina Guadarrama. Daniella.
16. A woman sits in a dark room. There’s nothing in the ice box. She doesn’t know how she’s going to make it. She is by still waters.
17. Urgency, like a grassfire.
18. A woman bends over in the pasture and picks up a feather.
19. She writes a letter in Spanish.
20. A woman pulls a calf at midnight on Christmas Eve and slaps it hard in the dirt to get it breathing. It might. It might not.
21. Joy like rain coming.
22. Joy like plum trees, dark plums.
23. Joy like iced tea with the right amount of sugar.
24. They need one another, right now.
25. Through no rain, forever.
26. A woman cleans houses for a living. She goes home and reads Shakespeare.
27. A woman lays in bed dreaming of the Nazis coming through the South pasture.
28. A girl sits in a classroom in Eldorado, Eden, Paint Rock, Big Lake, Miles, Wall, Watervalley, Christoval. She is too shy to raise her hand.
29. A teacher sees deep into dark eyes. She sees a whole river. Movement.
30. Your heart at its highest mark. Your pasture at its greenest. Recuerdo.
31. There are many things in the pasture no one ever sees.
32. There are many things in a city that no one ever sees.
33. It’s easy to find a large bunch of sheep, two or three hundred. It’s hard to find ones and twos on a hot afternoon in the deep shade of cedars.
34. If you had one hundred worries, what would you do?
35. Two blades of grass waver in the wind, barely discernible.
36. Empathy leapt forth like horses uncontained.
37. They are not two figures; they are one figure.
