In the previous post, we talked about Pictura’s move into the FAR Center for Contemporary Arts, which was the start of an on-going effort to create collaborations between various art forms. A continuation from last week, today is another work from the series of poems that were birthed out of a collaboration between local writers and Joshua Dudley Greer’s ​‘Somewhere Along the Line’. Paired with the photograph, below is a poem by WLS.

Joshua Dudley Greer: Elkview, West Virginia, 2016

The Knackers at the Swallow Hole

It was the knowing they found unnerving, the knowledge
that something unseen churned under the road — a rumble,
a gurgle, a groan. Water ticking down time, seeping through
rock, like a tear through an eye, until the limestone layer’s
collapse left the road’s metal rail stuck in midair, surprised.
A sinking hole where the city charges twenty dollars to dump
a truckload of trash. For the Knackers this is state-approved place
to bury their dead: their twelve blue herons, each gently sewn
into the folds of an heirloom quilt. Their beaver wrapped
in their favorite wool sweater, tied with a length of silk ribbon.
A pair of their voles tucked under the tongues of two shoes.
Their family of deer swaddled in bedsheets; the two does in the top
and fitted, and four fawns, each snug in a pillowcase all their own.
With each minute the pit crumbles some at each edge, like the sides
of a hole dug in damp sand — it reminded them of their childhood
on the lake, where they’d dig until water rose around their hands,
which they held cupped like the buckets of tiny bulldozers,
excavating scoops, carving the fragile sides of their pit as the hole
widened, until their knees sunk, the hole smoothing quick as it sucked
dry shore from above, filling itself full. Leaving a glassy divot
with two children buried up to their belly buttons by sand.

Poem by: WLS

Image by: Joshua Dudley Greer