The first time she’d seen one of his paintings, she’d reached to touch the dried brushstrokes--even though she knew she shouldn’t. He’d seen her hesitation and said, “Don’t worry. I’m glad it invited you in.” Gave her a grin.

Bottles. Different shapes, sizes, colors.  That’s what Allan painted. He was famous for capturing their exquisite transparency, filled with light—and for accomplishing this with incredibly thick layers of paint. 

Now she sat as his model. He’d approached her about being one the first time he met her at a party.  She blew him off. She’d been asked one too many times by men to “model” for them.  Six months later she saw him at a coffee shop. He’d looked up and smiled. For some reason, she believed that smile. Sat down with him. They’d been inseparable for a year. But she’d not modeled until now.

“You don’t have to sit so still,” he laughed.  “It’s not the usual portrait, you know.” She knew. Opened her half-read Middlemarch. Took breaks from reading by watching him work.

Blue. He decided she was blue. “Why blue?” she asked. “I don’t know—that’s just what you are today.  It’s a beautiful blue, too. Come see.”  It was beautiful—a delicate but radiant cerulean blue. She was quiet.

“Don’t you like it?”

It’s not that she didn’t like it. She did, in a way she couldn’t explain. But she also felt uneasy. “You know, I took a New Testament class in undergrad.” His brow furrowed as he began painting again. 

“What’d you think?” 

She chortled. “Not much. But I’ve always remembered the professor saying that we shouldn’t read the gospels as history books. They don’t capture reality in facts like a point and shoot camera.”

He looked up.

“They’re more like paintings. And paintings can be truer to their subject than photographs.” She paused. “Is that why you paint?”

He sighed. Put down his brush. “Sometimes I don’t know why I paint.”  

She blushed. “I’m sorry. It’s just so weird for someone to see me as a bottle. I mean, a beautiful bottle—but a bottle. It’s an object, a thing. I was trying to understand…” her voice trailed off.

“It’s okay. You aren’t the first person to wonder.” He looked at her silently for a moment. “You know, the first time I saw you it was as if you were bathed in white golden light. That’s why I asked to paint you.”

Flesh-Toned Shadows

i walk on carpet-burned feet,
marbling ferns tattooed pink.
streetlights normalize no one.
 

forward sidewalk, forward
 

purple-stenciled concrete leaves
greet deli-sliced black gelatin
kept in the refrigerator

too long.

               skate nicks.

ragged borders crust brown,
culturing protean ice.
                            
a spoons hopes


       one walks in layers.

When can you trust your heart? “Never!” is a good answer when I’m faced with uncertainty and doubt about my decisions. When everything looks like it’s going to hell faster than the speed of light, I want to turn my back on everything I believed with gusto 24 hours before. 

When I say “heart,” I don’t necessarily mean “heart” as in “Achy Breaky Heart” or “Total Eclipse of the Heart” or “Be still my beating heart”-------the romantic heart our culture lauds and vilifies at the same time. As deep as the emotion is when we refer to this heart, many times it is still--emotion. 

I’m talking about something deeper. Heart as a deeper love and knowledge--in touch with all that surrounds us and our deepest desires. Able to navigate and coordinate these as effortlessly as floating down the river in an inner tube on a bright sunny day with a beer. In a gentle current. No rocks. In the heart’s world, all that we need arrives beside us as we float (like that blue cooler filled with the next round of beer). And usually just in time. “Synchronicity” is the popular word for the results of the heart’s navigation and coordination. 

And I’ve experienced plenty of it. All of which I forget immediately when it looks like things are not working out the way I want in the situation of the moment. In those moments, I lose contact with my heart and toss myself into the sky dive of fear, without a parachute. Because--Goddammit!--the heart can’t be trusted after all. I free fall for a good few minutes (okay--days), always anticipating the splat! any second. The never-ending loom of doom. 

 Doom may make a cameo appearance, but Splat! never comes. I keep going...for one more moment. Then the next...and the next. Until I realize that in these moments I’m not free falling after all. It was all simulation. My feet are firmly on the ground.

 Guillaume Apollinaire

 

My first exposure to visual poetry came a few years ago with the anthology Writing To Be Seen: An Anthology of Later 20th Century Visio-Textual Art. Carol Stetser’s work is the first featured and it blew me away. I found myself agreeing with her statement in “The Color of Three”: “Language is important not only because it conveys our thoughts, but also because it shapes them. Our view of the universe is inherent in the structure of our language...Language sets the boundaries of our lives.” The role of poets is to shake up these boundaries when they become rigid, to open up new vistas in which our thoughts can roam. Visual poetry is one more way to do this and, at times, may be more effective because the manipulation of space in unusual ways in regard to language explodes our familiar language patterns in its sheer strangeness.  

This week, I picked up an anthology of poetry and randomly turned to the work of Guillaume Apollinaire and read “Il Pleut,” a poem I’d not read in a while. It made me think of visual poetry once again and the possibilities inherent in such a medium. I wanted to post his poem for Poetry Friday, and, while looking for links, found this video inspired by the poem. The manipulation of time and space in relation to language is beautiful and moving. The video may or may not count as an instance of visual poetry, but it does attest to the power that such poetry can have in creating new avenues of expression for others. 

This week Poetry Friday is hosted by Tabatha A. Yeatts. Check out all the other cool poetry links.