j.j.kirnan: eyes full of light and laughter: her mind had made

her mind had made 1

     Half a mile inland from the northeast corner of Lake Erie where it formed up into the Niagara River, lights spilled out into an alleyway in a small industrial pocket of Buffalo that happened to otherwise contain no all-night operations. It was just before dawn. Lighting, heat, an air compressor and occasionally the motorized traverse of an I-beam-tracked block and tackle contributed to affairs inside the high-ceiling one-story brick building, once an auto machine shop, now the site of a much riskier undertaking.
     In corners of the fifty-by-fifty-foot space were assemblages of glass panes, small panels of window-like units, unframed sheets of plate, lengths of aluminum tubing and other welded and fastened metal shapes. Along the walls and on workbenches it was clear by the lack of open storage that every extraneous item remained out of the way; everything extraneous to the construction of that which dominated the space.
     In the center, on a fifteen-foot square foundation designed to be moved by forklift or electric tug, a bold structure rose dramatically. Straight rigid members of metal angled up from myriad anchor points in the base to reach upwards. Some connected to others where they happened to meet. Others tapered and terminated twenty feet

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above the floor, seeming to shoot the sky. The geometry involved in the canting of these struts exemplified complex logarithmic order; it listened to a pulse and flow far deep in undercurrents.
     Filling the spaces formed by this three-dimensional skeleton was glass -- clear, clean glass. There were great sheets of it, cut to be triangular, rhomboidal, spanning nearly eighty square feet. There were small inset panes, repeating, offset from one another by mere millimeters, set as if overtones determined by an infinite harmonic series. There were narrow fillers between two not quite parallel struts. In many places flat glass panes were set in arrays of variegated angles such that the eye suspended disbelief and saw curving movement, when in reality no such curved structure obtained in this crystalline, mammoth sculpture.
     This was a piece to be walked around. A woman had been doing so for an hour. Her overalls were stained. They were torn, also, where the excess of one pant leg cuffed and hung over steel-toed work boots. Curly hair, once held in place by a ponytail, now rebelled against constraint, frizzing and flying loose. Occasionally she attempted to push it in place with a hand rough from working in the cold, bruised from the physicality of her art, cut in more than one place.
     She stopped at one corner of the sculpture, considering it for a very long time, with no movement except the flickering of intense black eyes, searching. Then her gaze lowered, abandoning focus on the level of the

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physical glass. The eyes lost their outward fire, their searching stopped for a long slow time in the silence. She was as still as the sculpture, mesmerized by its music in her mind’s eye. Then, as in a dream, one hand moved from her side and rose, evocatively curved and supple, making expressive circular movements off to her side, connecting.
     Abruptly she straightened. The immense power of her concentration returned to the sculpture itself, the fact of it here on earth in this factory floor for the first time. The dark eyes grew fierce again.
     Quickly, purposefully, she turned off every light in the studio and shuttered the windows. The sculpture disappeared. She took up a position she knew would be of advantage shortly. All became still.
     In perfect silence fifteen minutes passed.
     Then she reached over to a switch box nearby and activated its control. Above, a sizable skylight, slanted for north light, revealed itself. The first rays of morning entered the studio and glinted off the highest tip of the sculpture.
     She stood in place for an hour while the earth rotated under the sun, watching its power come to earth, captured in that which her mind had made.

     It was a full-blown January thaw.
     The sun proved its power. The south-tending pressure on the arctic jet

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stream relinquished its dominance; cold air retreated north. Everything melted. The streets of Buffalo ran with rills, rivers, of melt-off. By tomorrow it would be down to the grass, the hibernating grass. Now, liberated by the dazzling sun, water dripped and gurgled from rooftops, under snow drifts, beneath buried abandoned cars, in swollen streams whose voices had come alive.
     Mila sloshed home through it.
     In her happiness she considered the grand meltdown a tribute in her honor. She gloried in it, sporting a wan smile as befits facing the sun in a high sky after an all-night battle with fear, one that called on all her strength, departing the battlefield now victorious with her adversary impotent and diminished, whimpering in the dingy alley outside her locked studio which guarded its exultant contents with pride.
     Snow still lingered in the front yard of her house. She noted how dirty and granular it had become, crusty. She ascended the front steps squashing some of it into puddles. A wave of fatigue hit inside the front door. Within three minutes she had slipped under the corner of fresh sheets on her bed, within five had fallen deeply asleep.

     “What the hell is that great smell?”
     He spun around, smiling.
     “Bacon!”

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     “I’m starving,” she told him.
     “Breakfast or lunch?”
     “You’ll make either?”
     “Absolutely. I hope you slept well. I wanted to call to make sure you were all right, but I didn’t want to wake you up, either.”
     “Oh Karl, so sorry, I should have called you at the school this morning.”
     “It’s okay.”
     She came across the kitchen to him. “Sorry,” she said again as they embraced and kissed. She was sleepy, still, and tumbled around emotionally inside as well, but kissed him with confidence.
     “Isn’t it amazing outside,” she said, moving out of his arms, peeking out through one of the curtained windows. The sun was fully in charge out there. Everything was soaked and melting and sparkling.
     “It took fifteen minutes extra to get home. Some intersections are really flooded.”
     “You know we’ll see it on the news, at least one idiot in a pickup who thinks he can make it and gets stuck,” she contributed.
     “I saw a few like that. Not even trucks; Volkswagens and such. You know those trestles on Utica? Flooded.”
     He extracted from her the wish to have breakfast, early afternoon though it was. Eggs and toast, then, plus coffee.
     She grew silent, standing by the window. He was occupied.

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Eventually, however, all cooking noises ceased and an appetizing plate landed at her spot at the table. He looked over at her and she realized that with her wild curly hair, gigantic white sweat shirt, bare legs and socks planted on the hardwood floor, she must be a sight. She sensed him looking right at her insuppressible smile and so turned her eyes on him.
     “It’s done,” she said.
     “Really?”
     She nodded and moved slowly over to the table like one in a dream. The smile kept growing. She sat across from him. She said it again.
     “Done.”
     “It’s spectacular?”
     She just nodded, grinning.
     “It’s the greatest thing you’ve ever done.” He didn’t speak it like a question.
     “Yes.”
     “And it’s done.”
     “Yes.”
     “Did you end up with the second design?”
     “Oh, you don’t even know. The second design died around midnight, about an hour after I called you. Karl, there’s much, much more.”
     “I see.”

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     “I can’t even explain it. Everything happened in process. It went beyond.” She loved him substantially; that was the only reason she verbalized even this much. The events of the deep night were like new parts of her, organs which had just grown out. They hurt. But they thrilled as well.
     “Do you have to go back?” she asked.
     “No class this afternoon, no. Anyway, the entire University is probably closing down. I’m telling you, this is no joke. The river and the lake are still frozen solid and the storm drains are backing up.”
     “Come with me.”
     “You’re going back there?”
     “I have to. It’s not a choice. Even if I have to swim, I’ll be gone in less than fifteen minutes.”
     “I guess I’d better go. Save you from drowning.”
     She smiled greatly at him, but in a second or two the smile went beyond, took on a life of its own. Her eyes welled up and her face filled with a piercing, ingenuous joy. She cared not that her lover saw. She was safe there, in her home, in the presence of he who would not betray her, not gainsay her emotion. She let many things come true in her face, then. Her tears flowed not from the failing of her soul, but only from the opposite of pain: from naked radiance.
     “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful in my life,” he whispered.