¿Or Was it Like This?: Mary Frank1
After Presence (1985-86) and Breath (2020)
i. The Early Sculptures
I knew I would have to destroy the piece.
—Mary Frank, speaking of Presence
All stories begin with place. This one begins in the Catskills.
Winter now, her studio empty. Her kiln will not know fire
till spring. A single clay piece rests on the workbench—
unfinished, unfired. A face of great interior stillness.
A woman’s face. Abandoned. What sculpture asks is hard—
part discipline, part alchemy. To wrench and mend the clay,
to bend it to your purpose and release it to the kiln. Harder yet,
to find the will to turn away, let fire take over.
Spring. The artist returns to the kiln where a face awaits her,
fractured by cold. All spring, she watches the cracks
advancing toward eyes and mouth, our tenderest flesh
where the face we were given is first taken back,
where we must, at the last, accede to our past, to our stories.
Everyone’s story begins with place, with the cracks there.
ii. The Late Paintings
If I say I’m 85 years old, so what? But if I look at my hand
and say this hand is 85 years old…
—Mary Frank
In the Lake Hill studio, light still falls through eight-foot windows,
falls onto open sketchbooks, paint-stained tables,
ceramic fragments, fossil stones: the clutter of a lifetime’s work.
Sometimes, late in the silent hours when darkness fills
the glass, she asks herself, Is it enough—for a woman, for an artist—
to carve by simply passing here a faith of sorts, to hold it
to the touchstone of a life, which is memory, which is loss, and to attest
its worth? (So it is, I imagine her. Or myself.)
These recent years, her work has grown more urgent. Now, her task
is witness. To wreckage and extremity. To courage.
Fearless works on stone or board, landscapes lacking time and space.
Women dominate as before, but brought now to an edge,
a threshold. Women of omen, captured in metamorphosis, winged
or finned, leaping, flying, scaling unscalable rock walls.
Others, of such equanimity they might be gods. A mythic world
surrounds them: owls and horses, reptiles, primates,
wading birds. A human world, too, of strife and sadness, breakage,
brutal hope. On canvas after canvas, slender vessels bear
a cargo of the stricken, families bereft of past and desperate
to find a future in a land that won’t allow them in.
Consider this one, Breath: Nine tiny figures in a fragile craft.
Some crouching—in terror? defeat? Others beseeching
a stone sky. No distances here. Only thin, lapped sheets
of broken slate. Immense in the upper left, a face in profile
leans above the ocean’s turbulence—a presence on another scale
of being, preternaturally serene. Or, if not a human face,
perhaps, a ceremonial mask, unearthed for use in a ritual
so potent it will capsize them all. The face exhales,
a whisper as tender as a kiss. Follow it as it enfolds and effaces
the exiles. Must it be that Death is the one shore
to accept them? But wait. Nothing here is certain, this tale
is not mine—though it may, in fact, be ours. Our past?
Our future? No way of knowing. All stories begin with silence,
with its breaking: Once upon a time...
- The poem’s title is the title of Frank’s solo exhibition at the D.C. Moore Gallery in New York, Jan-Feb 2020. ↩︎
MARJORIE STELMACH is the author of eight volumes of poems, most recently, The Saints of Repetition (Grayson Books, 2025) and The Angel of Absolute Zero (Cascade, 2022). Her poems have appeared in American Literary Review, Baltimore Review, Gettysburg Review, Hudson Review, Image, Notre Dame Review, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Water-Stone Review, and many others. She was the first director of the Howard Nemerov Writer’s Scholarship Program at Washington University in St. Louis.
