“About one mile north of the oil seeps,
I selected my site,” Smithson writes
some years after the construction: six thousand
tons of rock & basalt levied by backhoe
into the lake where he directed the laborers
to assimilate the materials into his ideal shape,
a helix that would distort all sense of scale,
a figure that would express the underlying
structure of all molecular life. “He had
in his mind just what it should look like.”
A quote from Bob Phillips, the foreman, lifted
from his obituary. “I assume it was the artist in him.”




It is everything that surrounds the artwork
that forces us to circle back. Today, we want
to witness the pink water, the seabirds, the sand
oozing with petroleum, the site marked by splintered
wooden pillars to offer visitors a brief respite
from searching. It feels like we are on another planet,
we keep repeating. Nothing seems possible
in this atmosphere. Still, the land is violently contested.
All that oil. All that oil & no borehole to suck it up.
Still, the Art Foundation responds, making its claim.
The topology. The balance between flora & fauna.
The importance of an object built by bulldozers & stone.




Because there is no phone service, I rely
on memories of the language used by others
to measure what they have seen. “Shattered,”
the world Smithson used to describe the salt
water pools cutting up the sand. “No fish
or reptile lives in it, yet it swarms with millions
of worms which develop into flies.” I pay attention
to his verbs. Scooped. The groaning of the geologic fault.
“The site gave evidence of a succession of
man-made systems mired in abandoned hopes.”
On the beach we find the severed wing
of a pelican. Feathers still molting off the bone.




Standing on the boulders above the body of water,
chewing the scraps of a turkey sandwich, it is
possible to see the imprints of footsteps left
scattered in the dirt, the evidence of the effort
made to traverse the earth for an optimal view,
so that to look forward, to look outward at the land
curated for the viewer’s attention, is also to look
backwards, where the body once was but is no longer,
the body whose systems the artwork’s revolutions
seek to mimic, like the perfection of a wheel,
or the drawing Brancusi did of James Joyce:
the simple, corkscrew whorls of an ear.




On the long drive we talk about the manipulations
of syntax, how a properly distilled sentence can stop
time. One of us will cover the gas money, another
the food for a picnic where the water meets the shore,
where the micro-organisms infect the surroundings
with their color. “Every sentence was once an animal,”
Emerson writes. “Poetry is always a dying language,
but never a dead language,” the artist attests, so when
my attention is drawn to the rocks woven into a spectacle,
the alien beauty of the tar pits, I look. & when a friend,
hoping to snap a picture, tells me to stick my finger into
the bubble of crude seeping from the earth, I do.