Caitlin Maling

After Lindy Lee’s Echoing the 10,000 Patterns

Caitlin Maling

All I want is molten hardened, shattered into the points of the globe which stick through oceans The ladle the artist (Lindy) says, is all she needs to make worlds

It’s the size

of my arm,

the bowl: my two hands cupped

My sister the stained glass artist needs to leave the country to work with acid - hydrofluoric - the smallest amount to the hand doesn’t burn but you can wake in the night to find

your bones gone (I must look up / whether the bones / become brittle / or molten)

The motto: you can disappear without notice

The circle of the artist looks like acid hitting water and bubbling into air

(this too is toxic)

My sister works with glass not shattered deliberately cut the metal around the glass, lead (toxic) is welded lightly

This is not enough

She wants the acid that cuts the glass in different levels layers it

so the light is graded

She adds sulphuric acid to the hydrofluoric so if there’s a pinprick in the glove she feels it

An apocrypha I hold dear is that to touch a thing hot enough (like lava like molten metal like spun glass) with your toe will kill the rest the shock will stop you like a bushfire immolating a house by heating air

When Lindy throws these shapes drips them from the open bowl of ladle head

they glow red but when cooled are dull as dead fish eyes

Then she takes a hammer to them before buffing them back up like applying moisturiser to an ass after a spanking

There’s an art to violence and violence in art

My sister The artist picking forms and setting them ablaze

Author’s note In my piece After Lindy Lee’s Echoing the 10,000 Patterns, I was drawn to considering the material aspect of her craft, specifically the metal she works with and her primary ladle tool. While I was working on the poem, I was having conversations with my sister, Hannah Maling, a stained glass artist, around her practice. My poem started to bring the two materials – metal and glass – into conversation, focusing on the inherent dangers of both materials but also their transformative potential. With the form of the poem, I tried to emphasise the sense of something being poured, trickling and settling, as do the shapes in Lee’s Echoing the 10,000 Patterns (2020).

Caitlin Maling is a Western Australian poet and lecturer in creative writing. She has published four books of poetry, a fifth Spore or Seed is to be published by Fremantle Press in July 2023. Her current manuscript in progress is a hybrid text addressing the ocean ecologies of the mid-west Western Australian coast.