Pocket Change: a Poem for September

And Other Musings about Art and Time

Film stills from an early September evening swim

I recently read an interview with Joan Mitchell in the outstanding new book, Joan Mitchell: Paintings 1979-1985 (David Zwirner Books, 2024). In her conversation with the French Philosopher Yves Michaud, Mitchell makes the assertion that painting is the only art form that is without time.

“[Painting] never ends,” she says. “It is both continuous and still.”

Her statement has confounded and intrigued me since I read it. Mitchell wants us to consider time as contained in and emitted by art works, rather than time as mere context or content. The concept feels familiar in my experience of both making and looking at art—that is that, in the best scenario, a painted image stays with us in an indelible way, out past the capabilities of language, beyond the boundaries of time. It can be of the moment that it is made and of the moment it is viewed, and it can transcend both.

However, I have also wondered, what if painting is not the only art form that is without time? Can the same be said of poetry? After all— language, in both the way it is intended and the way it is read, can also be both “continuous and still.”

And so, here is my poem, “Letters to Our Daughters,” to read while you chew on Mitchell’s concept of time in art. I began writing this poem in June 2023, several months after I started down a treacherous road of cancer treatment. The poem has evolved since then as I have returned to it, trimming and word-shifting every so often. It changed with the ebbs and flows of the last 15 months; through my last chemotherapy treatment exactly one year ago today; through the surgery that came after it; through my recovery and months of further infusions. And it changed with the other manifold, dynamic and vital aspects of my life outside of the the realm of cancer: my treasured relationships, my art, my self.

And to me that feels just right. Maybe this has become a poem that spans time; it is of the time it was made, and of the present moment, where it will remain for you to read now, even as now continues to move in to the future as it always tends to do.

Now.

And now.

And now.

---

LETTERS TO OUR DAUGHTERS
by Lindsay Gardner


People are made of the same thing as stars, 
she wrote 
with a bright yellow number two pencil

a giant revelation
on a tiny scrap 

words that play 
like lyrics in my head 
when I wake, sweating  

where we lay, 
unmoored,
even the moon has vanished


Noiselessly
I chase the stories
of their boundless souls–
a desperate quest
for adequate language

until daylight
clear and callous
devours me


No–
I can name more precisely
in the weightless, lightless
murk of two to four am

hair skin nails baby teeth hip bone big toe knee cap ear lobe thumb wrist eyes palm nostril hand on my hand

the exact unnamable hue of their eyes
(your eyes, my eyes)

freckle below wispy lash
(we named it)

the smell of baking bread while she slept
(we named it)

her silken flesh
against this wicked breast
(unnamable)

ache too tender for this world
(unspeakable)


Again and again in the dark 
I burn just to be here 
to meet the sun when it rises 
again over the gray hill

to make myself a mirror 
for them to blow their breath on;
to feel them fog it up 
with their hot 
aliveness 

to write all the letters 
I did not write for them
across the years 

to yield to this thirst to trace 
the everything of their existence  

to make apparent 
infinity

to map
our impossible galaxies–
the absurd thickets–
of all we cannot,
will not 
know 

to listen to them to ask their millions of unasked questions 
as they keep answering mine

---