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| Crew-2 launch, April 23, 2021. Greg Diesel Walck photo. |
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| Coming Monday night. Earth & Sky illustration. |
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| John Elmer O'Brien, 1935 |
Keep to your field of color,
Smell of linseed up from the cellar,
Oils thinned and soaking into the canvas,
Failed-artist father trying again,
Decades too late in his sad privacy.
Shake free if you can.
These days I'm on the cabin porch
With a thermos of decaf, watching a corn-snow,
Dumped from the raised beds of purple clouds,
Roar through the oak and maple crowns
Like Ohio River gravel sliding into a foundation hole,
Sepia white incipient green.
Someone to read this.
Someone to know.
Someone to tell me.
Someone to lie.
Never, never, never like him,
Self-pitying father to please who can't be,
Masterwork finally his Pollock-like splatter
I would wash from the blue bedroom wall,
Color soaked into the pillow.
Never like him.
Someone to read this and tell me they did,
Someone to welcome the ice-yellow sun.
Tracks in a late-season snow
Circle graves.
Never like him, never like him.
Never, never, never like him.
—after the work of American abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler
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| composite photo by Andrew McCarthy |
Fractured
I work
in the silence of night
I make nothing
late in the life
I know something
of light
I know something
of shadow
I wait for someone
to say goodbye to
I pray the rare
turns to sound
—with fractured lines from Rowan Ricardo Phillips' "Fracture the Night and Get Thee Gone"
finding its voice in the budded crowns
speaking in rhythms unheard
in the gasps of winter
a richer voice as the canopy thickens
we might even call it passionate
in the earliest small leaves
saying she in the great oaks
slow to awaken
saying her in the maples
the sugars brightening
and in me and in me
what the wind says
that is what i say.
rain tapping on my hood
as calming soporific
as the fire
that flutters in the grate
mind unfocused soul adrift
stopped still
on a cold and rainy day
knowing we will die
it is as the poet said
death is the mother of beauty
an enigma at a younger age
a mystery no more
vaxed and masked
waiting here awhile
among the small astonishments.
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| Bluets |
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| May apple emerging |
Come closer and listen
something's gnawing in the wall
I think it's mice
partying in the dark
beyond us leaving us
to our human desperations
Curtains closed against the moonlight
violins and cellos bluetoothed
against the childhood memory of waiting
for the crunch of driveway stones
pillow pressed against our ears against
what came next at 3 a.m.
Hold your breath and listen
beyond these walls
coyotes yipping in the woods
pull back the blind and look
the red moon wounded
in dead pines
Come closer and listen
something's gnawing in the wall
tell me everything will be all right.
Magnolias
in full extravagance
outside Roosevelt Hospital
where she was with me
for awhile
a few pink boats
floating down
as she rose
up through the crowns
to expand forever
in the vastness of space
where life is the exception.
Our shadows are long
when we return in the evening
in the evening of our lives
from meeting those between us
but we ourselves are small
The crocus
clasps its hands together
deer move up the hollow
as they did a thousand years ago
Beyond the woods
the field
the sparrow-colored field
sparrows sparrow-colored
Where do you fly little birds
that heaven vast and squandered
having found each other
having found each other's dream
or not at all?
—patterned after Jaan Kaplinksi's "Our Shadows,"
as translated from the Estonian by Sam Hamill.
A flash of sparks
power enough
to stop a heart
headlong freefall
needing a beholder
to say what good it does
worlding
now and here
a glimpse of its creation
surging past.
—a cento extracted from Gjertrud Schnackenberg's
nine-page poem, "Strike Into It Unasked,"
the Paris Review, Spring 2021.
