Poetic License: ReVisioning the CCMoA Permanent Collection
On view through January 12, 2025
Cape Cod Museum of Art
Dennis, Massachusetts
www.ccmoa.org
Last fall, the Cape Cod Museum of Art (CCMoA) invited 30 Cape Cod poets to write a poem inspired by an artwork of their choosing from the CCMoA Permanent Collection. Poets were asked to consider the artwork as a visual prompt, to internalize and then respond to the artwork through their poetry in any way they saw fit. For this exhibition, the inspired poems will be displayed on panels adjacent to the original artworks that sparked their creation in CCMoA’s largest exhibition space – the Hope / McClennen Gallery.
On and On
Rosemary Dunn Moeller
On one side of infinity, I’m stretching my lifeline
as far as it goes. I can see a bit of my future,
my past, my adhesion to the present moment.
This torus is beautiful, stained, imperfect.
All lines curve; eventually, all converge.
“Here” appears so imposing, large, important.
So much depends on a sedimentary settling
within the stone, unintentional, unplanned.
Eons were spent in forming us.
And I have been sanded, chiseled down
by occasions of ineptitude, polished in moments
of clarity. So much has to be lost to create.
I forget where I swept the dust of me.
What I’ve created, who I’ve made, inflates
me, adds meaning to me, gives me substance;
I am the path I’m following.
[Image: Dorothy Polansky, Circle Within, 1986. Portuguese Marble, Anonymous donor]
