Language and Ash
A poem on cigar ash, former kings, and the afterimage of fire.
Read the stitched line. Then unfasten the image.
Poem & studio photograph
LANGUAGE / ASH / AFTERIMAGE
Look On My Works, 2025 · cigar ash transferred onto paper · studio photograph.
I devote myself to experiments
with language and ash.
Cigar ash draws a white arc through the air:
a brief snow
covering fragments of statues of former kings.
The fragments, like the bones of forgetting,
on paper,
leave scars that have burned themselves out.
Every flake of ash
glimmers with an unresolved secret.
Fingertips shake the ash loose,
like erasing the aftershock of a century.
The statue gives off a low echo.
It is far from power,
and far from fire,
yet it makes silence itself burn.