In the earlier series of collages dedicated to Billy Strayhorn, the series inspired by the anecdote of the jar, I placed a swan in the road in a picture postcard of Vermont. Was it an obstacle or a revelation?

Then I found a poem I hadn’t known before, The Swan, by Robert Creeley, an answer to and commentary on the anecdote of the jar:

Peculiar that SWAN should mean SOUND?
I’d thought of gods and power and wounds.
But here in the curious quiet this one has settled down.

All day the barking dogs were kept at bay.
Better than dogs, a single swan, they say
Will keep all such malignant force away
And so preserve a calm, make a pond a swelling lake—
Sound through the silent grove a shattering spate
Of resonances, jarring the mind awake.

I don’t know how to keep things alive without looking at them and commenting on them, violating them, renewing them, honoring them, reading and re-reading them. Walter Benjamin again: “Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear inevitably.” How long does history last? How long does a picture matter? As long as we study it, and turn it over and around and study it again. And even if we’re through with history, it is not through with us, and haunts us.

If I profane the sacred in order to honor it, to make it strange and new, I must invoke one last anecdote of the jar in a poem by Maureen Owen:

he said he had to turn the jar
Inside out to     get at it

In archives and junk heaps, and in the pages of books about to go into deep storage, holy pictures and poems wait for us to find them and make them our own.

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