Artist in Residence Writing

Jonathon Fink, an Artist in Residence from Fall 2023 wrote the following poem. This poem was published in a 32 page book paired with art by Julie Fink. 

In My Hour of Darkness, In My Time of Need

—On September 19, 1973, pioneering “Cosmic American Music” musician Gram Parsons passed away at the age of twenty-six from an overdose at the Joshua Tree Inn in Joshua Tree, California. Following Gram Parson’s death, Parson’s road manager and one of his acquaintances stole Parson’s coffin and body from the Los Angeles International Airport and performed a failed cremation at Cap Rock in Joshua Tree National Monument, attempting to honor what Parsons stated previously and prophetically as his desired request. This poem, which was written with the support of an Artist-in-Residence Fellowship at Joshua Tree National Park, imagines the final moments of Parson’s spirit and voice rising in the smoke of the failed cremation.

There is a voice on the desert wind, 
hard lines of relief, and passing from this world 

to the next feels as simple as stepping from the blaze
of the midday sun, quivering in the cloudless sky,

to the shade of boulders, the air there 
light on the skin, in the lungs, unlike the air

of a tomb, this shadow air cool and rising, 
light enough to carry ashes, to feed a flame, 

air as fuel, air to carry a voice, not on wings, 
but as an updraft, a flurry from which I form

these words. From the flint spark and the swirl 
 of smoke, I call to you, I, who no longer 

can sing, the smoke a curtain I cannot part,
 a haze through which I cannot see or stride.

In death, all memories fade as music fades,
though, transformed to flame, some memories

still pull, each rising cinder lighting the desert
as a throb, a glint, and then burning out, 

like the fireflies I saw the night after 
my father died, a suicide two days 

before Christmas when I was twelve.
I wandered alone through the orange grove,

though I cannot remember if it was then or before,
the limbs heavy and hanging as the fireflies

gleamed, like my father in the Second World War,
a fighter pilot, there at the bombing

of Pearl Harbor, the flashes of fire in the sky
imprinted on his mind, the back of his eyelids, 

stars in negative that no drink could quell, 
my mother, lost too from this earth,

from cirrhosis, the day I graduated 
high school. I remember both so little

and so much—the Cambridge sidewalk 
bricks jutting up beneath my sock feat

as I walked home still drunk one morning
after playing a show late into the night, 

my new boots dangling from one hand,
having rubbed blisters into my heels,

my guitar in the other, and before me
the Charles and the first glint of the sun

on the water, a rower in a single scull,
the oars dipping and feathering

like the divide between the living 
and the dead, the future and the past, 

and the boat’s thin wake trailing and dissipating. 
How easy it is to pull with the current,

to move in one direction while facing
the other, the near silence except

for the creak of the oars, their slight dips
through the surface, and then their rise.

All of this returns to me, though at the time
I only thought of home, one thousand miles

away. I always was aware that I would die,
but even now I do not want to go. 

There is so much still I want say.
To Nancy, Polly, and Gretchen, all distant

and estranged, you must search your thoughts
of me alone, as you have already,

and must further learn to do. I cannot tell you
what to think of me, and even if I could,

your thoughts are yours alone. Mine rise
to me in this smoke and flame, and I try

to shape you in my mind. Polly slips
between my fingers as if into a well.

Her hand reaches for me, and I don’t
or can’t reach back, the well a throat,

the water there dark and swirling
like her mother Nancy’s hair, 

dark as the pupils of Nancy’s eyes, 
her lowered gaze, turning from me in tears, 

in anger, telling me it was all my fault 
as I left again, the final time, yet it was I,

I think, beneath the waves, and they above,
peering down from the edge of a boat,

their forms rippling, and I could not hear 
their words. I see now that it was my throat

the water filled, vines from the ocean floor 
pulling me, thorns into my skin, their dark poison

restraining and suspending me, wrapping 
my throat, numbing me, never fully asleep

or awake. Polly, I have no claim on you 
beyond my remorse. I will be forever 

the father you did not know, the reed
of my voice all that remains, causing you 

to search for me in the arms of others, 
to stare into the faces on a subway train, 

their bodies jolting at each turn and the light 
pulsing like a movie reel at each squealing stop,

your reflection held in the tinted window
 within the subway car, spectral and ephemeral,

as you think you see me reflected, 
standing at your side, my back to you,

so much so you try to stand as the subway turns, 
and stumble, reach for the pole, a stranger 

catching your arm, but when you lift your gaze
the stranger is not me, and you are alone again. 

Your future without me will become your present
and your past, and I see you returning 

again and again to the hotel room
that held my last slowing breaths, 

you on the bed there in the dark
beneath the soundless fan blade, lying

where I had lain, your form giving shape 
to mine as a lone record turns in the room 

like the questions you will have of me forever. 
Gretchen, my hope is you will remember me

as on our wedding day and not as I am now
in the end, already separated from you,

your long-sleeve wedding dress abandoned,
its form a resignation, hanging like Spanish moss 

in a closet at your father’s New Orleans estate.
I would say one thousand times I am sorry

though I do not know what good it would do.
All I ever wanted was to sing. When asking

how hard it was for me and Emmylou
to harmonize, an interviewer, assuming 

the intricacies made the process hard,
leaned forward in his chair, two fingers 

at his dimpled chin, then smirked 
when Emmylou and I both laughed. 

Singing with Emmylou was the easiest thing
I had ever done, easy in its very nature.

Our voices intertwined like the colors 
of the desert sky when the sun resigned

behind the rock outcroppings and the mountains.
I wish that I could say I understand it all,

yet all I know and feel is longing 
for what I leave behind. 

Already, the authorities are en route.
The coffin burns yet will not be consumed.

There is a limit to how high this smoke 
will rise. It thins as all things thin 

and cannot hold these memories long.
My hopes and sorrows merge and dim.

Beloveds, sing for me from where I cannot sing,
and speak from where I cannot call.

From smoke, I merge into the air and sky.
Behold my desert stars’ last bloom.

Below is an excerpt from the essay written by Heidi Fischer, an Aritst in Residence from Fall, 2022.

The full piece, titled The Science of Seeing: Scientists on the Front Lines, is published in the Zygote Quarterly 30, Volume 2.

Excerpt from The Science of Seeing: Scientists on the Front Lines

For some, however, the journey through ecogrief has also led to heartening breakthroughs. Juniper Harrower is one of them. A desert ecologist and director of the Art+Science Initiative at the University of California, Santa Cruz, her work exemplifies the emotional challenges faced by environmental scientists—and the ingenuity of their responses.

I first encountered Harrower’s work in fall 2020 when I spent a month as an artist in residence at Joshua Tree National Park. Ever since camping out in a “forest” of Joshua trees several years before, I dreamed of spending long, uninterrupted hoursonce again in their company. These quirky yuccas with their shaggy arms akimbo against the turquoise desert sky reminded me of exuberant Sufi dancers. Like the tall saguaros in my own Sonoran Desert, they seemed to have a kind of sentience. The opportunity to live for an extended period of time among them in their namesake park was, well, a dream come true.

Harrower had been part of the previous year’s cohort of resident artists and her focus on Joshua trees caught my attention. Even more intriguing was this: her work as an artist drew on her research as a scientist.

As a doctoral student in biology at UC-Santa Cruz in 2015, Harrower encountered reports warning that warming global temperatures could compromise the long-term survival of Joshua trees in the park. Within less than a century, the science predicted that viable Joshua tree habitat would shrink to a mere two percent of its current range. The news hit home—literally—since she grew up just outside the park boundary. “That area of the desert and the Joshua trees specifically,” she recalls in an interview, “played such a big part in forming my identity as a person that the climate threats felt like a personal attack."

The fence lizards are sunning themselves

and I’m jealous, not only of basking
but also of their swiftness, their coordination,
the force of limb to limb, and they’re gone.
This is the balance of any creature’s energy:
conservation and expenditure.
Even these blue-belly lizards know
you cannot bend and breathe all at once.
Let’s call it a clutch then,
this bending of fingers, this hyperextension,
this pocketbook of rainy days,
this future of impossible hatchlings.
Let’s call it brumation when
this weathering, this wintering
in discontent. Let’s eat the social insects.
Let’s call it sit-and-wait, let’s call it lie-in-wait.
Let’s not call this jealousy. No, let’s say
it’s an arid appreciation, rare want.
O ecothermic life, this bite that cures
the tick of time. Let’s draw a breath to scale.

In a Land of Rain and Logic

Composed from text found on the home page of the Joshua Tree National Park website.

Come make homes in dark wonder.
Come together in a land of rain and logic.
O desert, tree, animals, night skies—
This variety sculpted cultural history and the wonder
Of our two strong winds and a story
Of this vast wilderness in me or you!