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THE LOVERS
after the painting by Marco Rosales
Shaw
He drew them bendable
and sinewy as first love,
put them underground
in a warm cave,
etched their shapes
with raspberry ink
into a slab of stone
the color of dark chocolate,
making art from the night
of their first encounter
so that years later
they would remember
what she couldn't recall
without blushing.
after DIRECTED CURVES
by Robert Chapla
from here
somewhere
is never too far
to arrive over and over
under turning sky
wind closing my eyes
tickling my neck
traveling skin
lifting fur
until I have ridden all roads
that wind through me
long leash a stretched freeway
water bowl a curved blur
window rolled down
to the buried bone
of my doggy ecstasy
BEGINNER'S MIND
after the painting by Tracy Grubbs
Foot pedals spinning, motion painted stopped,
warm seat dispensing rubber-bodied tot
chasing tossed ball blur, destined to land red
smack on your snoring, springing you from bed.
Trike tyke returning, could be boy or girl,
makes squeaky noises, engine starts to whirl,
catches momentum, off into the new,
open to everything, used to be you.
CLOUDS INTO BIRDS INTO FISH
after a painting by Dan Robertson
Alone, with the part of my mind
that perceives where I'll play
in the skies, I'm alive.
Indoor jobs are complete.
Once outside, I can recognize
absence.
There nobody speaks.
Soon the cry: "Come inside,
time to eat." I comply,
but because I'm provoked,
I chill mist into sleet.
I'd seen clouds become birds
become fish, with a car underneath.
All dissolve in the deep.
H5N1
after Robert Chapla's painting
"Birds of a Feather"
Before the avian flu became news,
before it was in the air, a prescient artist
abstracted a view of what it would cause
and cost: under attack, birds claw and flap,
trying to escape mass slaughter.
Will killing keep humans safe?
This possible plague men want
to avoid has morphed to invasive fear.
One species, aflutter, destroying another,
says, 'do it, just in case.'
SILVER LINING
after a painting by Mernie Buchanan
You like to sleep on your side
between sheets of blue light.
Lately yellow has slipped in.
You keep watch, half-eyeing it,
expecting early spring. Flexing
cold, thorny toes, you welcome
the new hue for its warmth
and weight, although gold
to replace winter's silver lining
might wrinkle a perfect petal
and end your drowsy state.
Painting by Robert Chapla
PULLED
in, as if travel along the lit undersides of risen freeways
were normal on earth's furred grass. Multiple disappearing
doorways enthrall the eye until there is nothing
for the body to do but yield to the inward roll
of slopes and slide below the joined overcurves.
The door shapes rotate into open drawers that wait,
upside down, empty, and asking. A high arrow answers,
pointing the way, up past the flower stems and buds
that are ready, when sky darkens, to shed light particles
like pollen, dusting the metallic buzz above.
From here we cannot see these continual travelers
but feel them riding the rainbowed freeway even after
night negates its magic colors, releasing us
from our contemplation or confusion
about this bustling metaphor for heaven.
PRECARIOUS STACK
after a painting by Robert Chapla
This is how life was, a shadow
in the shape of a commanding dad
back from the war, who read stacks
of books and newspapers, laughed
at straw men, cartoon characters
drawn like bales or bricks, sad sacks,
pointing at what needed doing.
Things then got done.
In that America there was always
a dog running, ears flapping
in wind, the green mutt in this orderly
heartland scene, made more poignant
by our leaving, our new lives spent
in less spacious places,
our strong-jawed, purposeful men
now peopling movies, soothing dreams.
Arrow-Shaped Pickerel
Shore
after Mary Reusch's painting
Not the man who tasted shapes,
but feeling the surprising bristle
of twigs against my tongue,
I sense the location
of this painting shifting: how thistle-
like, the prickle at my nape.
See Richard E. Cytowic, M.D., The
Man Who Tasted Shapes (1993), or any good description of synesthesia.
A SAUGATUCK BEACH
after Mary Reusch's
painting
This beach is like another beach
where another path
wound its way
to far water.
Plants and trees grew there too,
providing shade
and a succulent cover
to lie on.
We were young enough
not to mind
the discomfort of using it
for a first try
at each other's kissing prowess.
When I came up for air,
I murmured
a three-digit number.
"What's that mean?"
he asked,
through fog.
I blithely reported
it was the number of seconds
the kiss had lasted.
I knew immediately
that I would never do it again, never
count the seconds.
I learned not to ruin the romance
in my lover's head
with numbers.
I found out later
that words
could do it too.
Beddings
of succulents
on sand
remind me how tenuous
our hold on the other is,
how brief
the release
and abandon.
PICKEREL LAKE CALM
after Mary Reusch's painting
The multi-colored reflection
in that far section of water
is my focus
while I home in
on the Pickerel shoreline.
Eyes hooded, only pretending to be flying,
I gaze at the painting
on my computer screen,
suddenly realizing
my luck at being human.
I can contemplate this scene
without zigzagging,
swooping and swaying,
or flapping my wings
to catch an air current or tree limb.
Instead I stay still
as the lake
and make no effort
to maintain myself in air.
I stare at the reds among greens,
the sheen of the water
and where it's covered over,
thoroughly enjoying the unavian pleasure
of human seeing.
from Mary Reusch's April-May 2004 Grand
Rapids, Michigan, exhibit
© Mary Reusch & Sherry Sheehan
UNTETHERED
Green vines thread gray and knotted posts
on Crockett's high, Strait-facing slopes.
Some day their grapes will rise in toasts.
For now they're wavy lines.
Grass porcupines dry sprays of quills
while bovines freckle rolling hills.
Five graze below the traffic light
that marks the highway's climb.
The cows, the posts, and soon-to-be produce
pattern this part of our zigzag coast
like seams in quilts of bold design
that hug the curves near blue-brown
brine.
But we, encased in cars, move fast.
We barely glance at what flies past.
Instead we rush to what we're buying,
discounting worlds to which we're blind.
If we could set our human clocks
to grass and cows and grapes and rocks,
we'd step outside our programmed box,
see all there is, sip honeyed wine,
spread out our quilts, and slow down
time.
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AUSTIN SWIMMING HOLE
after Mary Reusch's painting
Time sprints. Two limestone racers
dominate the water, all layers
engaged. Clearing green,
they barge through cubes
of blue. Children who
used to swim here have grown
into ghosts, airily younger
than the solid layers they gather
behind. Remembering their grand
splashing days, how they dove
off solid rock into liquid
for just one more swim, groaned
when they had to come in, grinned
and did it all again, they're now
part of the forest of forgetting,
afloat, untouched by ground.
APPLE CRATE by Kathy Kearns
(Crockett Pottery)
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets
in.
----- Leonard Cohen
EPIGRAMMATIC EKPHRASTIC
Cohen's words collaborate
with Kearns's fired apple crate,
inspiring me to grapple with
our sour, irate state, my mate.
If light can penetrate each crack,
let's warm our cores, sip applejack,
grin at mistakes -- we'll call them gaffes:
our too tart words, attention's lapse.
Let hard-baked stubbornness abate
and anger dissipate, abashed.
Crisp apple of my eye, old flake,
pinched crusts like us are made for laughs
.
TRANSITION
after Mary Reusch's painting
Who are the other swimmers
in this topaz glow, where we wait
for what comes next? I don't know,
although I try to guess. Nothing
lasts long here. Slow-motion collisions
dissolve in mist. A hazy flower floats
beneath a searching fish, whose eye
evolves to form a space between
two blurs that coalesce into a kiss.
Ideas drift. Souls swim in sapphire
strangeness, remembering earth
hours spent pondering the what-if.
It's no clearer here, where I thought
I'd find answers. I review the past
but sense I'm meant to configure
a future. I want an explanation.
Allusion won't do. The new
must be brought into focus.
If I'm to exist again, let me
understand my incarnation.
Robert Chapla's Tight Knit Group
SIX CERAMIC COWS
wait in glistening, multi-colored
cellophane sprays, an unexpected gift
after she admired them on a rare trip
with her dad, back in town for a few days
from his other home. To her, their packaging
looks like a meadow half in shadow.
Instead of placing them high on a shelf
with the ornate, fragile dolls she cannot
touch, her mother lets her keep the six
by her bed in a box. She opens it
whenever she wants to remember being
with her dad, how together they spotted
the cows in the sunlit window of the gift shop.
She thinks of him as she arranges
and rearranges the six and tells herself
it won't be long before his next visit.
BLUE BULB STUDY
after a painting by Tracy Grubbs
Thought portrait, hidden within
blue glass, you hang upside down
from a nail, unlike your cousin,
a diaphanous idea, who springs
out of a cartoon head. Both of you
rebel against the boring confines
of package, plug or socket, preferring
disconnection; yet you're still
stuck. Cobalt-covered eccentricity,
morning glory wallflower,
pendulous pear, dyed bota of wine --
whatever you are pretending to be,
you emit no glow. I want you
upright, shimmering sapphire
and faint heat, but reflecting,
you cast a shadow, appearing now
as a faultless tear, scoured
by another's light.
FISH IN A FOREST
after Mary Reusch's "Meandering Creek Trees"
One is caught,
its thick trunk hoisted,
ready for filleting.
Parts will be hung
on those hooks
for weighing,
and below we see
fish bones eaten clean,
lying on the forest floor,
a spine curving just so.
Absurd, you say.
Not when fossils show
that where we roam
fish swam long ago.
ABOVE THE FENCE
after a painting by Robert Chapla
A frozen jump rope of a fence
three wanderers are grouped against
surprises one. A startled heifer's
inner calf just now remembers
how she met with no success
when uttering her bold request.
Although she didn't mention lunar,
nothing fooled her careful mother,
who mooed back in firm protest,
"Green-cheese cow jumps? What nonsense!"
EBB ON THE BOARDWALK
after "Ebb on the Boardwalk," a quilt by Valerie Sauban Chapla
She stitched in stages, building her quilt to enter a contest that asked
for "anything architectural." Planks of an Asilomar boardwalk formed its
underpinnings. Her longtime friend, a tree she had visited for years, spoke
next. It had started to die, one section at a time. She distinguished each
by color.
Her father had begun dying. Like her tree, he was leaving slowly. Like
my father, his humor carried him and all who knew him through his waning
years. He spent his last sunny days on his sailboat until he too had to
content himself with carving replicas.
Our neurochemical architecture lets thought thread through us if we're
made of flesh and bone. Who knows how wood thinks, or the others: scaled,
feathered, soft as a quilt or softer, diaphanous as jellyfish or snail
slither. When we must unstitch from the physical to become memories, those
with whom we shared life might catch us resting in this or that curve of
wood or careful quilt. On a sunny day they may feel us in the wind that
laughs into sails.
LOST TIME
after Diablo Slopes #15 by Robert Chapla
The fake fur that she's tossed by her
bed
bulks up like a mother about to give
birth
to cubs, yet feels smooth as her negligee.
Lying back, blowing halos of doubt,
she
stubs out her smoke and ponders the
evening
just spent, asks herself how much longer
her beauty will last and what she should
do
in the skin she's been lent. Maybe minutes
have passed, but sun has begun to pinken
her part of the sky. The globe spins
too fast.
She rises, dons clothes, decides not
to think,
strikes a match, and sashays into day.
after Mary Reusch's
Indiana Dunes painting
THE SEAHORSE
snuggles up
for a backrub
by hot to cold,
weather-controlled
knuckle stones.
Its belly and chest
are kept wet
with waves it drinks
when thirsty.
Granular as an anagram,
the seashore seahorse
rearranges itself
more slowly than
the lake it faces,
its back malleable
against so-called solid land
that readjusts with reluctance.
painting by Susan Schneider
PURPLEWOOD
swirls like taffy,
like a grape-colored freeway
to the beach in the distance.
It's a high tree house path
for a bright child's escape
from adult interference,
not a road others map
that demands full adherence,
not the purple of dresses
only old people wear.
No, this child wants new air
and his own adolescence,
swirls of wood I would travel,
were I not dressed in purple.
Pickerel Lake Fire Trees
after Mary Reusch's painting
They're still, but they move,
these well-costumed trees
about to push off from
the side of the lake,
a lake that looks glassy.
It couldn't be frozen,
but this stand of trees
seems burning to skate.
If I walk away,
will they begin gliding?
I'll stay a short while.
How long would you wait?
WAR WISH
(written 3/26/03, one week in)
Put the leaders in a cage.
Ventilate for spin, cigars.
Watch their testy powers rage.
Wars could take mere hours.
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