Drawing With Words: Artist/Poet Exchange

Cristina Arrivillage is a visual artist who expresses her inner world into the outer world with her pen.

So we decided to bring our muses together for a creative dinner. She gave me a drawing “to poem”, and I gave her a poem to draw.

The experience for me was a joyful deep diving, an endeavor of feeling into those deep places within us where Art is born.

Here was the result.

This is the drawing Cristina opted I put to words.

Here is my poem inspired from her art.

Unlit Marvels Ever Dreaming

Reflected in the everything, the boat afloat on streams of moonlight, past the boundaries within which you kept reality like hoarding treasure in scorching sands, is the place that could still be.

Be still until the timid are temped to emerge from the corners of your imagination where the real magic hides itself from the frowning faces of disbelief.

Find yourself in a world ancient and new, wait for the moth dust of night to fall like a blessing, and listen for the rise and the fall of a dreaming fox’s breath. When you hear a dragon giggle, board the first boat that comes ashore. Do not worry about its lack of captain, this vessel is steered by every step you’ve ever taken. It’s guided by every possibility you hoped might bloom. It’s here to take you to that stairway at the foot of the mountain it’s time to finally climb.

Climb past your knowledge and preconceived emotions and self-serving notions and see into a full blown night of singing stars beckoning you to believe that strangest and utterly outlandish truth:

Your dreams are daring you to do what only you can. Stand up on this mountain of mirth and claim yourself. Claim your doubts and joys and sorrows and elations, pick up your discarded childhood toys and remake this world so that magic doesn’t need to tip toe around the corners of the night. Remake this world by rediscovering what you’ve hidden in the unswept corners of your heart and it will carry you to those million stars, all shining just for you in the unmade world we race to in our dreams.

Poem to Pen

At this time of our exchange, I was revisiting a dusty online folder of poems I’d left behind. To instill one I was particularly fond of with new life, I chose one from 2014 called “At Any Given Time” to Cristina for her to draw in our exchange.

At Any Give Time (2014)

I buy memory cards I forget I didn’t need. A desk I don’t live near is filled with notebooks saturated with attempts at preserving what I was thinking at the time. I thought it might be important to you or someone in the future, maybe me.

At any given time I am far away from people I love and places that hold me like I need to be held. We never cease to be somewhere where we can make something out of someone.

We all need to hold ourselves as close as we can to that flame in front of us. Tell me about your warmth and I will convey my flame as best I can.

It crackles like a Christmas fireplace some nights and I never tire of contemplating it. Sometimes it soars and dances like an Irishman who has discovered whiskey for the first time. When the tinders burn down, it is words, printed and digitized, who keep me mesmerized.

Like tepid hot chocolate and the ubiquitous waft of campfire, I am counting my words and counterfeiting the future, printing it on the present’s paper.

Ask me about different times. Let’s play a game and ask about each other’s subtexts, treading on tippy toes so as not to fall through flimsy floor beams.

I howl at the moon when there’s no one to hear me. I have loved and fought animals and haven’t stopped looking for you in the laughter of bars and the breeze of castaway beaches. Let me catch you smiling and doing what you love. I tell people this is the river dance. But really, I have no idea what this is. I have no idea where this goes. I only know when things end.

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Here is the drawing that these words inspired through Cristina’s pen: