Certified Copy.........................Serin Lee

SERIN LEE (AB’21)

Between the dog and To bank one’s wings on shelter is to run from one’s own shadow. Birds the wolf, something above and below go to the races, submerged nearly in the dreadscape of darkening dying cows. What is it that happens in the unfinished photograph? The seaside, but something denser, more curatorial. Its window, washed ashore, is already too inundated to offer a generous view. Still, from its dim glass emerges Normandy and brine, each threading light through all that ice. In the distance, thunder and years of dueling remember only public faults. Arriving on their shores are men who remember only the child’s giddy dream, and the sober hereafter. In them, it is always raining. Perhaps they could be domesticated, but how then could the actor ever be his character? They are the peopled difference between memory and desire, as they err softly down the foothills. Meanwhile, illogical snow gathers itself around the earth, waiting on the ordinary to unfold.

Recurring symptoms Memories of a sparely painted gunshot. The birds are unwieldy—respond begin when chance is only with their scattering. In the background, a howl. Closer, the hound. displaced in snow The hunter is less concerned this time of year, and wonders at the meaning of such an expanse—of voices crying when snow disrupts a scene. How can the actor ever be his character? The deer wonder, too, but leave no tracks of their inquiry. A crowd still parting. The horses, marbling themselves, break against continuum and hold stubbornly to the foreground. They are bracing for the third snow, and want only quiet with which to pad their hooves. Let the fulminating day forgive them as they catch up to the ecology of winter—breath, too, catching on the storm when birds are willed once more into movement. 8

To make good Of course, at times it is all a mind buoyed up by the sea—how to hold it? distance, the wind is Waves break with less precision, though still fraying the world’s edges. the accomplice of Retrieve the other cows that amble toward the dead ones by herding them lawless trees whitely into synchrony. The sun, a thing unseen, scuttles narrowly past and informs the occasion. It knows fiction can hold no charms unless beaten on by light and water. Both break now, more pliantly, to sustain the picture. Stray branches retrieve new objects from the shore: dogs spreading through the day’s reef in muted tones. They pad across impasses, barbed wire—but outpaced by composition, they can retrieve only hunting rifles and late spring. The black herd is said to contain the missing crowds.

Afternoon multiplies The hushed trees too remind us of birds, now gone though evening isn’t thought, though not missing, neither is light. Sniffing the season’s wet mask for the winged quite this one shadow of one, snout and sense-making await new settings for grazing. We do not survive well the old task of aerating reason through the fields. The cows are glacial as we move through them, and sound out how we have merely become watchful mirrors. Ligh but never to completion. Some vegetation and color, a morning that does not age as easily as it lives. Soon they will tear themselves away from the page, for it too will end, or give way to lighter concerns. All too long to make relative. Imagine having to divine all the pauses, things on paper—lowing does not mend the composition, neither do tracks. That which you know of yourself depends on them, but when in doubt one must refrain from welding the darkness into pleasure.

When ecology fails, But only the birds can be sure. Watch them as they unfold, flying finitely try softer soil into the storm. All parties exhausted. His parts gathered together, the dog has no reprieve of most things—only of the wind, which breathes the caught sea. He frees it, for like him it is merely what it chases. Silence, a query forked by lightning, pads gingerly out of its death. The pleasure is in decreating. A sound bathes multitudes, even if one is simply passing through. Observe from a sanded distance the aired and aerated questions. Shadows are always behind in the framed world. Dying, too, is like this. It does not mean its indifference—its weightlessness notwithstanding.