ASK
Sometimes I forget the camera, forget
that the late afternoon sun can mix with the earth's warmed dust,
as it soaks back up from the fields.
We are driving from his parents' camp on the Tug Hill Plateau,
flat and dull until I start to see
the odd checkerboard patterns of meadow fan out in palest milky golds.
I want to stop, be free of our car,
flee into the fields, feel the light, capture the light,
inhale it, splay it across the soft resist of a stretched, virgin linen --
in slick varnish shine through the wet
with the glow of russet and Naples yellow.
We are driving fast.
My husband is talking about
what he wants to tell his boss
and an old sheep, barely white, cream,
stands alone by a bent stub of a tree,
munching, mouth working around, watching
as we barrel along.
We are supposed to be in Lake Placid before dark
and it will be tight
and the light is a way I have never before seen.
I say his name and I am aching inside,
not knowing why,
as he shifts his foot to press the brake,
it is so hard to ask.
BLUE BEACH UMBRELLAS
Why aren't I painting you?
sand,
the color of
sand,
relentless
under the grey
(sky) dome,
its anvils of August thunderheads --
CUT TULIP
the pink of this tulip is not my color
too blue for me to want to paint
afraid to bruise it,
I lay the side of its yet-to-blossom
against my cheek, feel its calm
of floppy leaves drape
my fingers that hold their stem,
their reed.of.being
a breeze taints the sunlight
with winter's remnant chill
the petals are tight,
close in on each other
-- a not-yet-bloom,
the stem severed.raw
as I release the pink.green
into its clear glass vase with space and water
for it to breath
severed.still.willing
NATURE MORTE
(for Morandi)
Where is that squattish bottle, azure blue,
the blue of Turkey, from the time of my handsome, stubborn Turkish lover?
A pomegranate shape,
its surface hacked with odd facets.
Did this husband drop that bottle too and not mention it,
hoping I'd forget? Or is it gone
like my phone number from my mother's mind.
I am sick of bottles.
I've done them before.
Flowers are an excuse for texture and light
but I will do pears: the reddish or the green of early Sienna's terre verte
-- the Bosc or Anjou.
I struggle with the shapes
and echoes of blackbirds or a Brazilian river or two.
It only works when you're mad.
A twist of the palette knife flicks a dollop of slick ivory black.
See the late afternoon light just before the sun turns blood red,
noiselessly lisp across the lumpy fruit
defined by the shadows between.
MOTHER/UNFRAMED
When I paint your body,
do I paint what's left behind?
No, I paint the soft light
spilling onto your last bed.
Did I irritate you when I tried to tell
you what business was like?
You bought me that suit anyway,
mahogany, thick wool weave,
snappy padded shoulders
and the long, slim skirt with a slit peeking out from a thick fold.
When I paint your body,
What am I fed?
Your estate's
numbers and forms
at my desk where I look
into the picture frames I took from your room:
photographs of babies, boys, young men --
my two sons growing.
I never put out pictures of my own.
When I paint the soft light
spilling on your bed...
You smelled of romance,
your teeth slightly crooked
when you smiled,
your glistening mink, fur deliciously cool--
when I buried my face, it tickled.
Your high heels clicking as you left, with Dad.
When I try to paint your body,
I paint something else instead.
We both married twice.
The first time you bought me a white leather book
to record crystal goblets and Tiffany spoons.
You ordered pale notepaper, monogrammed
with my new initials from a lead plate.
We both made long lists with our cross-looped letterings
in blue ink, now tossed together
in my attic in a box.
When I paint your body,
something unlocks.
PAINTING SHEEP
I sketch, stand with my wire-bound pad
and Blackwing pencils, the lead soft and dark.
My hand swoops round the bulbous shapes,
jabs little sharp strokes for the knobby knees
and that odd patch of wool sticking straight up
on top of the head, ragged
so my pencil zigzags to chase it between floppy ears.
Munching, working, round small mouths.
Sunflowers in August salt the fields orange.
Why is it so hard to make my husband stop the car?
Is it my husband? He always stops if I ask.
Where the trail dips toward the base of Cascade
a stream of glassy water magnifies the glacially rounded stones.
My husband is hiking.
I like to hike.
I like to use my body
but he's always ahead with his book on philosophy, waiting
on a rock, like a mountain goat, watching me catch up
while I place the sole of my boot
alongside, not across the thick roots,
step after step
remembering the sprained ankles,
the scent of my sweat attracting the small black flies.
What if I stop for a moment? The trees are scarred
when the wind pulls away their mask.
The sheep are far out in closed pastures. Dozens -- puffy, dirty brown sheep
shag across lumpy fields on skinny stick legs.
I knock on the one weathered house.
An old man gets a young man with dark hair,
the one who breeds the blackface sheep. With his wife
we three walk in the fields hidden from the road.
This was his grandfather's land but, well, you know,
taxes, and they'd sold it to some westerner
who replicated a Montana ranch, built
the three story clock tower with logs.
He overseas the place.
He raises his blackface sheep.
She smiles but is missing teeth
and the lines in her face make me look away.
He says she is Italian.
In their gardens when I ask about strawberries
he snorts about frosts in August:
only potatoes and roots grow this far north
but I see his wife's dahlias, snapdragons, zinnias
dancing, wind-tossed, a froth of pink.
Take a stand. Stand on my own. Instead, I am a student again
caught in a slow, dry task.
The November snows spread out to the base of Algonquin
where Roosevelt first heard McKinley'd been shot.
A father and his two college sons.
No compass. Blinded by a white-out,
they break through the snow,
ice their feet in a stream.
No one prepared me for this wading in tar --
trained to be the good female, never crass.
I get out of our car, slip around on the rutted ice.
My fingers too numb to sketch,
thick paper prints grind out of my Polaroid --
in black mists bright eyes and spindly legs take shape.
Shaggy coats from a distance that look like great capes,
close up are matted and stained.
Under tail flaps, clots of dung and mud.
In a creased photo a grimace mars my mother's face,
a cigarette smoking from between her lacquered fingertips.
Nothing moves in the fields.
Gone the barn's crude wooden doors that kept foxes out.
Instead thick thermopane reflects a grey sky,
white sale stickers stuck on the glass.
I'd meant to ask the farmer
about the one sheep that never moved off, her back legs stiff.
Clotted wool hung down her matt black face, blocked her dull yellow eye.
She turned her head slightly, as if to see.
GRID PAINTING
words on canvas delineate sounds or shapes
OWOWLCOW
MOM
WOW
FOX HOWL
uneasy chiasma of boxes that make a grid
or the grid makes the boxes
a voice in my head reprimands
that’s a silly thing to say
as the pen drags across paper
whose tooth catches at the tip
unable to say
becomes
how to say
becomes reproachment in dreams
back to my
fox scampers to the right, furred legs a flash of red
in its tiered box
embedded in toothpaste whites
or rather snow as silent as Pamuk’s
each box a footprint
trekked through in a blizzard of flakes
a welter of harmonious dissonance
within crossed lines
