by Jennifer Atkinson
after Cai Guo-Qiang’s “Reflection”
A wooden ship swamped, wrecked,
submerged for years, for decades, the ruin
a refuge for sealife, was yanked loose,
the broken hold emptied of ocean
and stripped to the planks. The ship displayed,
run aground, on the gallery floor,
unfit for other use than art,
is now the very image of sea-
unworthiness—the hull streaked and hackled
with shipworms’ random scars, the splintered
timbers nonetheless preserved at sea
like flesh with salt, is here kept as is
in optimal conditions. Dry-docked, de-masted,
the whole ship, above and below
deck, refigured, recharged with new
white tea-sets and mass-market Kuan-Yins.
The china gleams, every piece glazed
alike, some intact, thousands broken
on purpose in pieces— porcelain heads,
handles, half-moon saucer haloes,
heaped up together. The artist’s Reflection
a stove-in boat and its cargo of shards
world-famous now, re-purposed as brokenness
is not a boat, any more than its bodhisattvas were
ever bodhisattvas. Art— who knows
what it’s good for? But breaking
makes things unlike other things—
irreproducible, unidentical— not wholly reflective.