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Secret Affair, 2013

The action is placed in an exhibition space where an interpreter leaning against the wall is reading during the time of the exhibition's opening event.

 

At some point the interpreter reads out loud facing the wall, the poem “Often I Am Permitted to Return to the Meadow” by Robert Duncan. 

The performance ends after the interpreter reads the poem, hangs his hoodie on the wall and proceeds to leave the exhibition space. 

Secret affair is an homage to Painting.

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow

by Robert Duncan

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,

that is not mine, but is a made place,

 

 

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,

an eternal pasture folded in all thought

so that there is a hall therein

 

 

that is a made place, created by light 

wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

 

 

Wherefrom fall all architectures I am 

I say are likenesses of the First Beloved

whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

 

 

She is Queen Under The Hill

whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words

that is a field folded.

 

 

It is only dream of the grass blowing

east against the source of the sun

in an hour before the sun’s going down

 

 

whose secret we see in a children’s game

of ring a round of roses told.

 

 

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow

as if it were a given property of the mind

that certain bounds hold against chaos,

 

 

that is a place of first permission,

everlasting omen of what is. 

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