Today’s episode is guest hosted by Myka Kielbon.

Transcript

I’m Myka Kielbon and this is The Slowdown.

A couple of years ago, my mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I said a wind chime. I wish I could remember why. It must have been a pure kind of desire. She bought me one with a turquoise pendant dangling from the center. She told me that she’d read the boxes of every wind chime the plant nursery was selling, and that this one was supposed to summon good luck for the strength of your voice. A few weeks later I moved into a house with two singers and hung it on the porch. It’s traveled with me everywhere I’ve lived since, from sublet to sublet to sublet, and finally, to my current balcony.

When I’m in my hometown, I now stop by the same plant nursery to get another wind chime to give to someone I love. I like going to their homes and hearing a little bit of this elemental music. I like knowing I’ve left something to keep playing it when I’m gone.

The wind chimes remind me to be perceptive to what passes through. To set prisms to refract the beauty that moves all about us. There are mysteries of the earth, and within the body, and even within the soul, that we cannot simply excavate and inventory. There are questions not to be answered, but explored. This is an ethos to artmaking, I suppose, but it is also an ethos just to getting dressed in the morning, to the little acts we do to exist in our environments with care and purpose.

Today’s poem speaks to someone who left marks on this earth hundreds of years ago. It asks what elemental — and metaphysical — forces moved through them, like wind playing the chimes. Just like those forces did then, and do today, and will tomorrow.

Shadow Play
by Jessica Fisher

Autumn. Light. Under what 
sun were you born, did you grow. 
Under what king, what tyrant. 

What window. What door. The four 
horsemen, the seven sisters, at rest. 
Whether a thousand years, five thousand, 

is a long time. Still, a stone 
held in the hand will warm. 
The same goes for bone. 

Who fed you, a hand extending 
the spoon. What fed you, music, 
art, or light. Was there an empty room, 

shadows cast upon the floor, 
the boards liquid with sunshine, 
and was that how you imagined 

the soul: open, ready, very still, 
even if the day itself was windy. 
Or was it for you like the wind, 

tempestuous, infiltrative, 
lifting the fallen leaves. 
Did you think about it at all. 

Many lights cast many shadows, 
so that the hand on the paper 
is reflected time and again, 

the knuckles like the mountains, 
one range after the next, and each 
a fainter version of the same color, 

so that our sense of the faraway 
is brought close, the brush dipped 
again into the water, a little less paint 

for the next stroke. The path 
curving away to the right, around 
the hillock, into the copse. 

A little gate breaks the view. 
Beyond, the beyond, 
given as a stripe of blue. 

This is how I came to know you, 
as a smudge or trace—thumbprint 
on the potsherd, residue in the flask. 

“Shadow Play” by Jessica Fisher from DAYWORK © 2024 Jessica Fisher. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Milkweed Editions.