Artist Statement::
Tara T. Boyce grew up in Bend, Oregon and is currently living in Provo, Utah with her husband, Ryan. She is currently a graduate student and writing instructor at Brigham Young University, finishing her M.A. in English with an emphasis in rhetoric and composition. She owes much of her success to her fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Krakow, who helped her write her first poem on a butterfly that “fell from the sky, and landed on a daisy nearby,” to her parents who pretended that poem was awesome, and to Ryan who has never read that poem, but would most likely cheer and call it genius because he knows that’s what his wife needs every once in a while.
To see you now, sitting against a wall of windows,
eating a slice of pizza with hands and fingers I have kissed a thousand times,
a street lamp through glass illuminating snow falling on pavement
behind you—
I want to know how
all the sky can fall and build behind you as if
you had always been, but never been.
As if I’m not sitting right here, looking.
Will you tell me, tell me.
If only I knew more than what I see in a moment.
If only I knew more than what I hear, what you tell me in bed stories and in early morning songs
over cooking eggs.
If only I knew more than what I smell, what I taste, what I feel, your skin, not even your bones,
against my skin, your hair between my fingers, which I hold and drop in clumps that scatter like
dandelion seeds in wind across linoleum.
If only you knew what I meant when I said what I write now: you
are beautiful here, sitting across the table with all of forever behind you.
Is it possible to love that which we cannot fully comprehend? We,
who assign meanings to snow, earth, and windows?
The snow is
with or without our meanings of it, our understandings of it—
doesn’t that mean something entirely separate from ourselves?
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