Relationships
for Ishrat on her birthday –
Such comfort in the bee
who between the florets & petals
is seeking her sweet
transluscent drop of almost
honey. Like she was
homed here. Like the face of the sun
flower opened for just this
moment and the bee,
this bee,
heavy from her last
home – oh those pouches
of pollen – twin purses –
& isn’t the richness all the more
sweet in the leaving
the pollen rising / \ falling
\ /
rising
falling
in something like applause
Pain-gleaned
Pain-gleaned but there’s always a nerve
hiding behind the silence where quiet is
a hunted laboring mother giving in at last
then slipping to the same world her still-
born baby has slipt to.
Moving forward
she sleeps & the piece
of
her who made
the baby & brought it to term only
to have to paw through the gaul of the after
birth searching for the stone
that was thrown at her glass castle
finds nothing but immensity nothing
but layers & layers of drapes of immensity
which being the seamstress she now is
she stitches together to hang
pleated & neat in the house she lives in
now at glow in the dark but a glow nobody
being outside that dark could ever imagine being
illuminated
Imagine: In the Yellow House, Arles
Yesterday’s replica was of Van Gogh’s
Arles bedroom. The
cups. The rumpled
red bed-
covering
the almost
floating
above angle the viewer
needs
to appreciate
standing
to see
it
all falling some-
how
down
hill. (it seems the bedroom
wasn’t
plumb, he’d said
in
a letter to Theo)
but
to see it
the
way Vincent saw
to paint it perspectively
waiting for
people
to sit to
sleep against the edge
of the wall,
the straw sun
hat hung
behind the head
board next
to the frumpy paint clustered
frocks but
oh the room is so…
See?!
RED!
& BLUE & LIVINGLY
neat!
unrumpled cover. In
the painting
there’s room for two:
two chairs
two pillows
two then
two paintings & one
where
two might
walk,
grasping each other, through to the trees.
