Older then, one more yesterday notched into this haggard wasted belt, tight about, turning in the widening gut, but must be the clothes, despondent, I seem, up the block quirky bobber says, and I think he’s talking shit on my writing, but no, he says, your mien, like a traveler lost his way, fearful forged face, luggage jowls, over needy and under taken.
Ate too much, talking to self, I don’t travel well, I say, when he tells me, Go to Hell, but let’s go for a beer sometime. Drank to gorge, piss like a glacier melting, violating the graces, not a single work of mercy, no incense in my crucible, my feet leave a trace of beach tar on the pavement parchment.
As the third and final act ends, the boards weathered smooth, the audience awakes to the smell of coffee and petrichor coming down the aisles, the ushers throw open the great doors of the hall. But what’s this, another act? The players pretend nothing really happens backstage dressing room sweat when I present sweet flowers to the star.
“You are the light of the world. A city set upon a hill cannot be hidden” (Matthew 5:14).
Not to mention something you’ve put up online. What’s posted online can’t be deleted or hidden. That is the poet’s dilemma, who craves publication but still has changes, or will have. But that is only a matter or problem of print. Oral poetry, or song, allows, invites, indeed wants variations. Covers. Over time, cities get covered up. The earth rises, and falls.
I assumed the Queen Mob’s Teahouse poetry editor position back in April, taking over from Erik Kennedy, Queen Mob’s second poetry editor, from May, 2015, who followed Laura A. Warman. The gig is volunteer work, of course, as befits any true poetic enterprise.
I first put up, on April 19, three poems by Jax NTP. It was then the idea came to me to use my own paintings as the header images over the poet’s work. I was struck by Jax NTP’s atmospheric, impressionistic poetry. The poems are packed with energetic images changing with the speed of “Highway 61 Revisited”:
“there’s a giant temple on hazard and new hope street blue reptile and green mazing skeletons, keepers of time how long can you sit there with the pain before you try to fix it?”
And I had just finished a painting, the impressions of which, the symbols within, the colors, the shapes, I thought might complement Jax NTP’s poetry. I don’t mean to suggest any of the paintings necessarily align with the poetry in any literal way. In any case, I continued to look for images within my collection of painting pic selfies for complementary impressions.
Reading and reflecting on Jessica Sequeira’s poems, and later looking for a painting to go with the posting on QMT, I again felt the suggestion with impressions that seems the essence of poetry, particularly of poetical delight:
“The heavens have promised rain for so many days. I think of waiting for torrents from the white sky. But it might be a long time. Or this could be a dream. Taking your hand, I guide it below, to my cloud.”
I selected for Jessica’s poems a painting from last year, “City on a Hill,” a large painting that had taken some time to complete. Again, the setting of the poems and the painting seemed harmonious:
“lakes shine like mirrors reflecting tall mountains
rainfalls are unpredictable innocent changes in the divine mood
birds sing into great holy spaces the wind whistles its reply
icy glaciers plunge towards sky green valleys dive into earth”
I had taken numerous pics of “City on a Hill” when a work in progress in the basement studio:
And I used an early draft of “City on a Hill” to go with Ashen Venema’s poetry:
I sit still, watch him thin the oil and restore his long gone love on canvas, standing in as the young skin by the window, sunlit among lilies, fresh cut, and Persian rugs casually flung across seats.
Well, the setting of Ashen’s “My Painter,” “sunlit among / lilies,” doesn’t quite align with the basement studio, though things are there too “casually flung.”
All my paintings I eventually give away, to family, friends, colleagues, who show an interest and enthusiasm. “City on a Hill” is hanging in my daughter’s den, looking out upon the backyard. The light in the room is perfect. I just want or hope the paintings have a life outside my basement, where, as Ashen puts it in “My Painter”:
“A blaze of light rims his white hair from under his thick swirl of brows black humour hides, and surprise”
After all the work on a painting, which isn’t really work, of course, but play, like the work of much poetry, we just might find a true work of art in what we’ve mostly ignored, in the mess we left behind. That tablecloth, for example, now that’s a work of art!
The Coming of the Toads 