MICA IN NYC: DUMBO 2014 @micanyc2014-blog - Tumblr Blog

Nate Hellstern

I recorded the woods and played this listening back to the woods and wondered why we call it playing catch and not playing throw. The sound of goldenrod reminded me that an empty shirt sleeve takes after a flute. Sunsets must be where painters come from: I recorded that too, orange sliding to pink, the slow closing of the black eye of the day. Leaving a bar twenty eight years later, I realized Betty Caulder was talking to me in handsprings as a child I couldn’t hear. Drunken stars have been the kind of friends to nod and listen. I never get this right: stars or planets shimmer? Is shimmer the word for seeming always about to break into song? Shimmering rocks, shimmering dirt, the shimmering sense that if I stopped wondering what follows this, I’d feel a part, not apart. All I’d have asked, my Incan heart removed from my chest, is that the priest hold it to my ear so I could hear myself inhabit the quiet.

Bob Hicok (elegy owed)