For Howard Smith (1928-2021).
Some weeks ago I carried this Howard Smith sculpture from a studio and storage space in Munkkiniemi, Helsinki to its temporary home in Vallila, a district across town. It should be easy— easy as in after the journey is over, I would only think about how the face at the end of the tines stares back at me, and I don’t necessarily think about the journey of getting it here to its temporary home.
I lift it maybe like Smith would have lifted it
each eye
think how to bear the weight of it
and not labor over it but make it look easy, like light as air
Mostly, things work here. The bus comes on time. People exit through the rear doors. Inside the bus is a registered quiet. There is a general sense of public order, which is sometimes bewildering but mostly it is what I want.
It was a rare moment when things
did not work
where the bus was coming in ~ 2 minutes for 44 minutes. I waited for the bus in the 1.4° F weather, trying to understand how the others made the cold look easy.
How does it move through them? I don’t get it yet. Maybe in time I will. For those 44 minutes of glitched time, I loosened my expectations about what was possible in two minutes.
Again and again, I counted the tines on the sculpture.
There was a relatively brief moment when Howard Smith was alive and when my knowledge of him and our aliveness overlapped. In the intervening months between then and now, I have written many poems for him and spent the month of July in the Finnish town he made his home for many, many decades. I climbed the hill to his home on a pulsating summer day and was invited inside it, too.
For some time
I thought about our near possible encounter during his final living years. It didn’t happen, but nowadays, there is the sculpture as witness and strange fissure in that it is something that Smith made when he was alive and now we watch each other.
For me, it acts as a thread, like a bridge to some other time. I guess objects can do that for us, it is what they can give us, this territorial and textural presence of a person.
So I lift it maybe like Smith would have lifted it
each eye
think how to bear the weight of it
and not labor over it but make it look easy, like the incremental 2 minutes held in the 44.
Audio: Every now and again, cars pass the bus stop while we wait for the bus to eventually arrive.
Asiya Wadud is the author of a handful of poetry collections, most recently Mandible Wishbone Solvent (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming this month) and No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body (Nightboat Books, 2021). Her recent work appears in e-flux journal, BOMB Magazine, Triple Canopy, POETRY, Yale Review, and elsewhere. Asiya’s work has been supported by the Foundation Jan Michalski, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Danspace Project, Finnish Cultural Institute of New York, Rosendal Theater Norway, Beirut Arts Center and Kunstenfestivaldesarts, among others. She teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School, Columbia University, and Pacific Northwest College of Art.
