Sculpture Poem by ENRIQUE WINTER

This
like a full-scale reproduction
of ice
that recalls the official drawing of a snowflake.

The symmetry of lines not in the snow:
let them be long nails. Let white feathers lie between them.

As they get bigger
they realize what it means to get bigger: f r a g i l i t y .

Which makes crisscrossing lines read ‘snow.'

How many lines on a piece of paper does it take to see it,
someone asks, watching the snow fall outside the window.
Then glances across his drawing to one he's just made
of an animal.

What does a one-year-old child see in a pen's mark
so that she says ‘meow' when she points to it?
When does that drawing
begin to be a cat?

He leaves the two dimensions of the drawing and comes back to the three
dimensions of the afternoon,
of the full-scale reproduction of ice.

A sculpture.
A sculpture made permanent what was fleeting.
But something growing on the cheek of a sculpture,
grass for instance, can make fleeting the permanence of iron.

To make fleeting what is permanent, a consumer good
that used to last forever:
radio, table, house. Overconsumption alters the sculpture.

What is permanent
and its defense
against consumption and its owners.

Permanence is revolutionary.
Permanence is f r a g i l e .

Like ice
depicted in a sculpture.