Post-It
Sticking to the window pane,
Yellow scraps of paper
Contain the land outside.
Bird song pasted on
Swirls of writing
Rains against
The blinding sky,
Whose fall migration
Lacks the sense,
The communal eye,
To separate the sun
From the reflection
Of its flight,
Hymns of rise
And fall covered
By their quotes
In sounds of light,
Covered floats
To save the birds,
Not notes of words but blurs
Of notes held up against
The waning winter,
Spirit writing
Planing on the atmosphere,
Welded to the air,
The glassy
And immense
Music of the squares.
September 10th, 2017, Roscoe
March 27th, 2022, Kaiholu
Explanation
While writing his piece for Lincoln Center in the summer of 2017 at the Cosgrove house in Roscoe, John had tacked up a hundred Post-Its on the picture windows. This was reminiscent of the beginning of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, where the reflected furniture floats in the plate-glass air. Nabokov’s glass may be a delightful mirror, but it is also a weapon of death for the bird, and a mock sun. It merges inside with outside, but that is just a solipsism: in reality it is a barrier.
My window pane is also a wall, but it contains post-it notes which will open all of us to the music of the spheres, so the post-its are a wormhole into a nature which contains us.