The work of Ondra Lysohorsky

The pleasure of moving comes from unpacking a box once you've moved and finding something you'd forgotten you had, having already decided what to throw away or leave behind at the old place for Goodwill.

Some decisions are easy, like the orange chair, there's no doubt the orange chair is needed as a place to sit and look out the window while taking a break from lifting heavy boxes and unpacking them.

However, the orange chair looks good in a box, not unlike a ceramic by the late Ken Price that you just want to look at and then touch as if it has no other purpose than to be looked at and touched.

There comes a time though when looking at the chair and seeing it as a ceramic by Ken Price comes to an end, and the chair must be lifted out of the box to assume its full chairness and placed in the room with the window you so like to look out of.

Boxes and more boxes, boxes on top of boxes, boxes with broken legs and injured wings, boxes returning from surgery, ugly boxes dressed in rags, white boxes, brown boxes, boxes sitting on the floor, boxes piled to the ceiling...

...there's at least one special box, packed with something you'd forgotten you had, something as rare as a small book of poems by Ondra Lysohorsky, a Czech writer of the 1930's and 40's, bought in the early 1970's when poetry was more important to you than politics and history.

To be a poet is very difficult.
It takes both volition and grace.
Every heart opens up
like a hospitable lonely inn.
In his wanderings through time
he is always at home,
even if he has nothing
but his voice, his tone
by which all recognize him,
the lonely one,
at the edge of a thick forest
called eternity...

(From "Selected Poems, Ondra Lysohorsky" Grossman Publishers, Cape Editions, 1971)