Video, 12:07
Holidays Special
Year: 2019
With death
There is hyperventilation
Then you can feel her heart sink
and her breath leave her body
With death
There is a process of uncovering and recovering
You make the ground hallow
You lower the body
and cover it back with soil
Death is full
To look at rich soil, to think of the dust we are made of and her sublime life
To look at a plant and see life
The grave is heavy of dust and water but the earth is fractured
The monument will be fragile for some time
Will you find an empty grave at the end of eternity?
There will be flowers
Though she was cremated
May we cover her ashes with flowers
The lid of the vessel that seemingly holds the body
Her spirit flows like a river
I’m grasping the absurdity of real currents slipping
Dominique Knowles, I Felt Her Heart Sink Into Her Body, 2016
When we bury ourselves in the ground, does the hole hurt the earth
Or was her soil soft enough, waiting to welcome us into her burrow
Or is it more natural, to lay on the grass until the earth swallows our
bodies so that we will
be closer to her roots
Is the heart like this
Dominique Knowles, Is The Heart Like This, August 9, 2018
Sometimes death is your friend
When you call for your mother
to take me up
for this life is too harsh
to watch thyself wither
{when the wind summons your home
forcing you to burrow underground}
{when the home becomes empty
of your lover and children
you float upstairs
the room where you made life is now a hollow ghost
there’s no more reason to go downstairs}
When you stop speaking
to be reunited
With your lover
for you watch her body become limp over her ferocious soul
Silence as a surrender into death’s embrace
Dominique Knowles, May 3, 2019
Credits
Tribute to the orca Tahlequah, the chimpanzee Flint and other empathic animal beings in mourning.
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna/Rome
Holidays Special
Video, 12:07
Year: 2019
With death
There is hyperventilation
Then you can feel her heart sink
and her breath leave her body
With death
There is a process of uncovering and recovering
You make the ground hallow
You lower the body
and cover it back with soil
Death is full
To look at rich soil, to think of the dust we are made of and her sublime life
To look at a plant and see life
The grave is heavy of dust and water but the earth is fractured
The monument will be fragile for some time
Will you find an empty grave at the end of eternity?
There will be flowers
Though she was cremated
May we cover her ashes with flowers
The lid of the vessel that seemingly holds the body
Her spirit flows like a river
I’m grasping the absurdity of real currents slipping
Dominique Knowles, I Felt Her Heart Sink Into Her Body, 2016
When we bury ourselves in the ground, does the hole hurt the earth
Or was her soil soft enough, waiting to welcome us into her burrow
Or is it more natural, to lay on the grass until the earth swallows our
bodies so that we will
be closer to her roots
Is the heart like this
Dominique Knowles, Is The Heart Like This, August 9, 2018
Sometimes death is your friend
When you call for your mother
to take me up
for this life is too harsh
to watch thyself wither
{when the wind summons your home
forcing you to burrow underground}
{when the home becomes empty
of your lover and children
you float upstairs
the room where you made life is now a hollow ghost
there’s no more reason to go downstairs}
When you stop speaking
to be reunited
With your lover
for you watch her body become limp over her ferocious soul
Silence as a surrender into death’s embrace
Dominique Knowles, May 3, 2019
Credits
Tribute to the orca Tahlequah, the chimpanzee Flint and other empathic animal beings in mourning.
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna/Rome