Who Knows Where Art Comes From
© Claire Paulette Turcotte

I dream her world from the inside,
reveries creating mountains

and hills of woman flesh,
the Mundis, the rite,

my body, the Church,
the wounds, the unbearable adornments.

I pin the worlds together with strips of cloth.
I am the end, the beginning, I wait,

at the end, the wilderness dragging me into form
and, hoarse from crying, she comes.

I dig in the mounds, the angles, the images, the flesh,
She wears the cloth I pieced together with paint,

the shrouds, the altar, the candles blazing above it.
I reconcile my grief, a chronicle,

holding the ends. Where art comes from,
I thread, I write.

holding the ends
together, touch.

notes
(before I recycle my paper I tear it into strips. Sometimes words I have already used pop out in a different order. This is a found poem that was gleaned from one chapter)