Book design for Syracuse Stories; The Story of ArtRage Gallery

ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave
Syracuse, NY 

“….

The spirit is permanent, the flesh is evanescent—
If we try to know it, it eludes us;
If we try to grasp it, it escapes us unaccountably;
It always remains just outside our reach
Like the rainbow or the flower our plucking kills:
No matter with what tenderness or solicitude
We care for it, with what effort or pain we try
To master it, it dissolves in the hands like the touch
Of something held too long in the grasp—
That remains for awhile after we have let it go. 
It is only on the spirit we can ever leave our imprint,
That gives some sign of our existence, retains
The stamp of our identity, that we can change or possess:
If we take a woman in our arms,
It is only her soul we can ever embrace.
The realest marks we make on her are invisible,
The most lasting impressions leave no trace—
Unless they are perhaps to be seen
In the heaviness of her movements as she prepares for bed,
As if they were already filled with sleep;
The acquiescence of her body reclining on the couch,
A little fuller curve to her haunches
As she stands before the stove preparing supper; 
The softness of her touch putting the plates on the table.
Only the figure of me she bears inside her lives,
What I am there in the place she holds me—
As a flower lives in the eye of the beholder,
A book only in the mind of the reader,
Our desires in the things that satisfy them.
Outside our home in the spirit we are nothing,
We do not live: with her body against mine,
At night in bed groping through the rooms of her soul,
I climb the stairs to my life in the dark.”

—“Her Body,” Theodore Holmes