My poem Conjugation was selected to appear in Apollo’s Decathlon, an olympiad culminating in a multimedia summer exhibition at Château de Montsoreau Museum of Contemporary Art in the Loire Valley, France.

Invited artists, each representing one of the 203 countries participating in the 2024 Paris Olympics, competed in one of ten categories: painting, drawing, poetry, music, digital art/new media, sculpture, performance, fiction, installation, and photography. 

My piece was on view as part of the “Conceptual Olympiad” exhibition at Château de Montsoreau from 14 June 2024 through 11 August 2024.

 

CONJUGATION

 

What he cares about most is how a character like him

            becomes a legend. A few strokes of ink,

handsome enough to be repeated and

recalled,     understood, a symbol in people’s mouths, a mess

           of meaning sealed in a glyph and welcomed into a permanent dictionary

 

            He is        男   Man        A rice field (田) paired with strength (力)

Gender as labor          Destined for dirt and defined by infinitely finite strength

Bent over the muck, tool in hand, he assesses

 

            女      Woman       Three fine strokes containing a space that creates universes

 

He envies how she can’t be broken down into radicals    She is

            a radical         She is exactly what she is      An icon

            Written quickly or smudged, she is easily mistaken for   文     literature itself

But he is a singular fairytale, a story of work with no promise of reward

 

            Once upon a time, he was     侽     not just field and strength but

also   人     Human                                            Two strokes like a crucifix 

                  How wonderful to levy one’s humanity into a staff of sorts,

                  something to lean on when the hot sun grew too big or stayed too long

                                                                                                                                              overhead

 

But then one day it vanished or was stolen or maybe it just became

                      more popular to strut through the rows of seeds without the burden of 人

Can fight anything when you’re light

on your feet, from lipids to hippos

                                              Legends fight barehanded

 

They don’t work barehanded though

To enter the fray without a weapon is bravery –

                                                                                     to enter the fields without a tool is idiocy

 

            And the happy ending?

            That ultimate conjugation all legends charge          towards?

When literature woman and labor man step into one

            another and become each other’s radicals, when

                      they become parts of a single

                      whole, the result is

 

                      merely 娚                                   Loud talking