Bronze Ambition

 

This is not about you.
Transfixed in our bronze ambition
Our gaze ellipses seething desire
Claiming a seat in place we recall remembering.

Our stages are plays within plazas of forgetting
Invisible in a confirm legitimacy.
What we knew as necessity you discover
In passing your indifferent reverence.

We night-day unmoved signal to every bronze figure
Hot-cast monumental and sea-melt dissolution
Before and after erected and disappeared
Our tribe of memory absent forgiving.

AFFIX 1
How many walking wheeling drifting by consider Rosa Parks settling on a bus? Ken Kesey furthering on the bus? Eugene Skinner gazing at his butte? Envision a living roundtable:  Ken and Rosa nodding either on-or-off the buses. Eugene and Ken considering country living on partitioned Kalapuyan riversides. Rosa and Eugene agreeing to difference and distance.

AFFIX 2
Three “life-size” figures in small plazas share surprising communalities. Each representing a once-living person of various fames and infamies.  All seated allowing space to sit-in next-to. As they stare-gaze occupied with the lost longings, vague necessities, decisive concerns. Looking ahead down no way nowhere highway. Statues do not witness. They bestow absence, accreting in patinaed past. Smooth surfaces of memory congeal. Stasis of polished bronze, empty gestures, once brimming with resounding urgencies, showtime news, echo and recede ...

NOTES  
— Photo of the three sisters who dashed up as I was studying the Rosa Parks sculpture was done with parental approval.
— The three artworks, all commissioned since 2000, are within 2 blocks of one another in downtown Eugene. I was involved in managing the commissions for the Eugene Skinner and Ken Kesey statues. For artists, facts, myths — the usual suspects — lookup in Wikipedia:
    Statue_of_Rosa_Parks_(Eugene,_Oregon)
    The_Storyteller_(sculpture)
    Statue_of_Eugene_Skinner