air as an object and place

after reading about Ágnes Nemes Nagy on steve roden's blog i asked Allie to check out a collection of Nagy's poetry (titled Between) from the UIC library. one thing (of many) that i've really picked up on is her descriptions of air as a somewhat solid form:

The great sleeves of air,
air on which the bird
and the science of birds bear
themselves, wings on the fraying argument;
incalculable result
of a moment's leafy silhouette
bark and branch of a haze living upwards
like desire into the upper leaves
to inhale every three seconds
those big, frosty angels.

-----

This will be the ... do you see? Up there, where entire cubic meters
of air are still vacant, up there is nonexistence. Transparent still, open to
question. Too much wind blows through it. But nothing that a good lens
couldn't fix. With an adequate intensity of light, of course. Because such
a thin layer excludes it, such a thin layer preventing existence. The edges are
almost visible up there in the space between certainty and doubt so that it
almost becomes describable while this inverted diminution (a large dim body
of a ship) floats into the picture with its pre-natal and impenetrable storeys.

-----
the first excerpt is from the poem Between and the second from The Transformation of a Railway Station. i hope to soon be able to translate air into sculptural form in the same manner - as ephemeral phenomena and experience (to the extent of non-existence?) are becoming more and more important to my practice. i see this related to my recent obsession with earthquake lights and ball lightning.

image from the New Mexicans for Reason and Science

Update 11/12/10:
I think I made this piece (kinda) already. here. It just needs a better title and some documentation.