Inside Serra (Poem)

Richard Serra, Torqued Ellipse
© Richard Serra

Installation at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, 1999

Inside Serra

   . . . you always have to find where the boundary is
in relation to the context. . . .
   ~ Richard Serra

You could be polished,
put on a shiny face

but for that alchemical mixing
of oxygen with the elemental,

leaving you earthy and russeted,
uncosseted: more your own style.

Your steely Cor-Ten skin corrodes
itself eating browned orange to amber,

a matte time duly applies
to tone your iron-ored heaviness

as you tilt and sway for emphasis.
I see you for what you are,

a hulking tactile multi-ton torque
shedding one look for another.

That spring at the Dia, a train's ride
out of New York's claustrophobia,

your massiveness moved me
inside your insides. I could

have come unfurled,
climbed your walls curling

and sinuous and closing in
the farther I go in. Your curves

wrap their sinewy rustiness round me,
impressing on me their muscle

meant to make me weigh
the arcs of meaning you achieve

even while standing perfectly still.
Your path takes me deep. Not

till I look up do I get how
the dark and the light work in tandem.

© 2011 Maureen E. Doallas
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Richard Serra at Dia:Beacon and Dia:Chelsea

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I offer this poem for the One Shot Wednesday event at One Stop Poetry, which each week invites poets to share, read, and comment on each other's work. Be sure to visit the site late Tuesday afternoon and every Wednesday for links to the many contributors' poems.