The Hamlet Project

If I could understand my own pith and marrow
Of my own attribute, I feel like I might
More readily notice its theft.
Sometimes I steal it myself – unknowingly, of course, just –
Whoop – the marrow is sucked out of something;
Its inner substance, the heart of it, vanished.
Oftener, though, I catch my pith dissipating in the daily diminishments,
The tiny shavings of my wooden sculptures, not seeming to
make much of a difference at first
but over time, the figure, once a woman, loses an arm,
a leg, a shoulder, a cheek,
until it is no longer recognizable as a woman.
Something once clear and elegant becomes abstract and unbalanced
From all the little wood chips of compromise.
But it’s not this visible, no,
The marrow is on the inside of the inside
When it is stolen away
Our bones become brittle and the very foundations of ourselves
Can no longer stand.
This wooden figure of a woman loses her arm
First from the inside
So that for the outside viewer, she appears the same
Until she becomes so hollowed out
That what was arm becomes empty space.
I have a gallery of these pieces,
If you saw them, you might think they’d stand forever
But slowly, slowly
They are losing their shine, their luster and
What’s holding them together.