More Parts:  Add Up

Wholes are made from parts. Parts and more parts, which add up to something even more. Obvious, right?

Sometimes we can’t see the individual bits. The atoms that made up an oak table. The bones in the body that provide the body’s scaffolding.

More often, we see components but ignore them. The bricks that form a wall, the fan blades in a ceiling fan, the fibers and stitches that make up a sweater. Or the parts of a car. I simply expect the my car to start instead of wondering if the combustion system has all its parts in the proper places.

I like art where I can see the parts coming together into something more. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a painting or sculpture, a collage or multi-faceted installation. It also means words, which taken together can be prose or poetry. Words are effectively invisible to us most of the time. If written well, the words themselves tend to fade into the background, with content, tone, or effect becoming more important.

Parts In Art

At the Cleveland Museum of Art, we recently saw an early-1900s face mask made of wood, aluminum, copper and hair. It was made by by someone living in Western Sudan, Guinea, or Mali. The materials used all have other potential uses, too, but here their arrangement makes a unique whole.

The Akron Art Museum has a large wall sculpture by El Anatsui, the Nigerian artist. Anatsui created Dzesi II from thousands of flattened bottlecaps, which were then connected with wire in narrow strips, and the strips further connected to create the entirely of the piece.

 

The parts and the whole–both separable and inseparable. It’s like one of those optical illusions. You know the one where you look at the line drawing and it shifts back and forth between looking like a vase and looking like a couple facing each other? The effect is something like that. Small parts add up to something more, but you can’t always see the individual aspects when you are considering the whole.

Tree, forest. Forest, tree.

In this week’s poem, small parts–like the word nor — add up to something more.

More Parts: Add Up

First or last and neither this nor that
I know it sounds like gibberish, a poorly made
game, one plus one is five, something rises from the parts.

I know you want this to make sense, as do I,
and who wouldn’t want the fresh-swept streets
to stretch out before himself, pieces perfectly fit,

neither promising nor denying?
Who wouldn’t want bread fresh from the fire,
whether hand-rolled and raised while meditating

or simply a plain and common staff trundled out
of the mechanism of more and more often?
At the first encounter, either is as good

as the other. And later, each has its own
commendation. He said he didn’t think
nor was a word and if it was, it was

a double negative. That thought’s wrong,
but the sentiment applies. Nor does
double-back, arch into advanced poses. King Pigeon

tweaks a nerve resistant to any, or such, moves.
One round scrap of metal deserves more, as does nor,
that it too become more than a scrap of a word.

 

If you enjoyed More Parts: Add Up

You’ll find more of my poems on this blog or in the collection Stars Crawl Out From Their Caves, which is available in both ebook and print.  Missed a poem of the week? Links to prior weeks are on this page.

Have a great week!