My Ticket to MailArt Bliss—from Hélène LaGache

[Thom Courcelle]

Hélène sent an envelope with artworks that struck a blissful chord near my heart...

Inside is a collage that looks nothing if not like a travelers ticket...with its partial map of Bordeaux (?) sitting beside a blue azure sea, and a new imaginary train track route that will take me on an exotic and scenic ride through mystical terrain not even discovered yet!

This trip includes entertainment in the form of a performance art poetry reading. The splotch above the poem is reminiscent of a figurative body bravely jumping from a great height into the unknown. The performer weaves a tangled tale, restructured, rearranged, slashed, cut, remembered, inescapable, unable to be erased from memory...because the body remembers...

     Under bramble burrs,

     rags kissing the heather,

     the crazy/wild life of his body.

     Push in, they shout.

     All you have to do is draw from it.

     From the battered ground

     a stump cracks.

     A network of lamps returns

     to the castors of genesis.

     Between the shadows and the clearings

     the ancestors with heavy/magnificent powers,

     someone looks at the binoculars

     toward the lizarded (?) summit.

This is the stuff of my [MailArt] dreams...adventure travel, exploring new and virginal places on the earth...and poetry both visual, and delectably, deliciously written.

Loved this, Hélène!!  Thank you!