In Riana’s garden you can wander
paths among hostas and horsetail ferns and
leaves so big they look like floppy birdbaths.
You can walk under pebbled arches and
sit by a fountain that might have come
from a thousand-year-old village in Spain
except Riana made it with her hands
grown strong from forty years sculpting
these many concrete figures mosaic’d
with glass and tile. Menagerie of stone
angels, mermaids, fish, birds, monkeys, a world
completely her own folded into woods
of a hundred-and-fifty-year-old farm
in the June time when lush canopy
encloses the windy ways and vistas ever
leading the eye on to deeper magics.
In forest shade a fairy with butter-
fly wings kneels on a shield-sized leaf,
its thick stem grown as if from earth.
In her cap of metal leaves from a Mexican
hardware store, she brandishes in her left
hand a cemetery vase, strangely petaled,
harebell-shaped, like a torch. The message
of her presence moves you. But it’s her
face that ruins you, her wide-open eyes
with the button pupils Riana explains
give greater expressiveness, and her ragged
smear of inset red-shard mouth, this urgent
winged girl at the heart of the garden,
radiating her steady intensity,
burning from within her hollow, molded
limbs, telling you truths from which you come
away beautifully disturbed — left to
wonder whether you, with your own childhood
memory of Her, could ever create
something so honest, so fierce, so alive.
.
Thomas R. Smith
Wouterina “Riana” de Raad’s concrete mosaic sculpture garden, Beldenville, Wisconsin
.