To Forms Not Yet Liberated

You have to wait with profound patience.

Two lovers, one head tossed back, the other places an ear on the shoulder, their fingers pressed against each others’. Thousands of years in this granite. Michelago, in the quarry, studying the stones, passed right over you. Never heard your sighs. Never even brought his hand against the rock to feel your back, the curve of your neck.

Angry gods trapped with devils underfoot, snakes writhing, waiting to be released, the stone feeling tighter every century. You used to be angry at impossible humans, forever thinking they didn’t need you, they could do better, but now you feel pity for them. But you are still angry; you want to feel the summer rain, you want to hear leaves turning colors. You want a child to walk by and glide her tiny palm across your foot. You imagine it every day.

They are waiting all around us: in tree trunks, boulders, pieces of jade and onyx. Some so large they cannot be housed and some so tiny they could be mistaken for a coin. Some are there, just beneath the surface, easy to get to and elegant, but many live deep in the marrows, the sculptor working for years to find you.

We must support the artists who find and free the figures. In the course of our humanity, we will not free them all, but we must try. The forms are our function, the beauty, released from all the extra weight and trouble, revealed from every angle.