I feel like three of six blind, describing Elephant.  But here I am anyway, at my work table.  I try to imagine everything I ever put on it,  and thwomp it 4 or 5 times with the soft side of my right fist.  I think to draw it warbly lips in permanent pen, on the grained surface, so it can tell what it’s seen, what it thinks.

beginning with a story I don’t know, which is my favorite kind, of when it was a giant wall panel in a downtown Louisville office. It was already at the place in Eastwood when I found it, stick stacked with 20 others like it, each weighing more than anything ever.

I have only my two hands, and the radio, and a studio that doesn’t look anything like what this table could have predicted, no clay, not one glaze bucket.  It was ideal for clay, because of its solidity, and when the sawhorses were stiff like new shoes, i wonder what ‘ s gonna happen, i said to myself.  The parts don’t predict the whole, the yellow brick road isn’t a straight line dorothy.

I look into the side of my expansive work table, the cut edge, oak two- not one-by’s, notched and laminated, this table easily held 600 pounds of clay without sagging or budging.  After I gave up clay it was medium after medium: fiber, encaustic wax, oil paint, paper clay, book binding, realistic life size human figures made out of paper pulp with real glass eyes that I had fabricated in pairs by an actual ocularist, who was concerned at first about matching, since she only ever has to make one.

And then came the metal work, and the electronic fabrication, the LED’s, and screen sculpting, I affix the aluminum mesh to the long edge of the table, which by now is also a painting of all the  edges of paintings I’ve rested on it.  There’s stoneware embedded in the grain, a smear of PVA bookbinding glue that wo-oh-hon’t come off, and I am probably being driven mad, van gogh style, by the cadmium yellow under my right hand’s favorite resting spot.

i cannot see, i cannot see, like a lens occlusion, astigmatism, the flashing, part-disappeared DMV peripheral vision test.  in the studio, like a bracer, ‘go make your things,’ says Muse.  i decide to give up misery.  All done.  Allll done.  Make your life, how dead we are nearly all the time except now.