(for Susan Rodgers’ sculptures, Berkshire Museum, summer 2010)

She gives us the air to watch,
to notice the circles that crown our head,

to notice the color we breathe, speak through,
and when yellows are drifting away

she frames the blue where we’ve forgotten to look.
But looking we remember she put them there.

She won’t overwhelm or withhold,
or exile the air to a rainy pink,

never carves it from things which already exist.
Yet air is only half of all she streams.

She sets air in a color afloat in a cup,
in a tree, in the flight of a bee,

on the hand of the crimson sun.
Air settles wherever she lets it go,

lets it go, strings it up or hangs it out.
She can stretch it from roof to the lowest sill

with the style of a hummingbird always on show.
Her wires bend to the flair of appearing,

to a thrum and a tremble of yellow string,
and no gate and no ring, or anything more

can speak to the footfall and high-rise there.