Musings

Border Incident

Inspired by the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry illuminated manuscript, 15th Century, public domain, Morgan Library collection, NYC

A manuscript
   Dipped in gold
Behold the insect bold
   He dashes through a maze of flowers

The Book of Hours
   Has been defiled
   The beetle smiled
He drew too near
   A warrior’s spear

He bled.
   The work of art
   Was stained with red
A new design
   A crimson line
   From blood-ill-fated

A manuscript illuminated!

La Reve

Written while contemplating Henri Rousseau’s La Reve at MoMA, New York City. Rousseau (1844-1910) never traveled and spent his entire life working as a customs clerk, hence his derisive nickname in French, le Douanier.

Through shimmering slits in a bamboo screen
Fruits and flowers can be seen
Monkeys munch on tangerine
Lions lunch on meat that’s lean.

Amidst banana and cucumber
Jungle splendors without number
Lies a maiden bathed in slumber
Dreaming of vistas far away
From the world of le douanier!

[Bess Heitner, NYC]

In A Moment of Remembrance

Sunlight through the window streaming
   softly warmly strikes my thighs
Delighted sounds of children playing
   fill the air, increase my sighs
Footsteps echoing in courtyards
   tell of strangers passing there
Wind-swept leaves now swirling crisply
   make sounds like gentle waterfalls in air…

[Gail Spangenberg, NYC, 1974]

Rain Dismay

“The rain is raining all around,
It falls on field and tree,
It rains on the umbrellas here,
And on the ships at sea.”
[Rain, Robert Louis Stevenson]

Won’t someone rein the rain in, please!
It reigns discourteously
O’er tennis, soccer, baseball plans
—made by my family.

If Robert Louis Stevenson
Were only here to see
How his verse about the raining rain
—has got the best of me.

[Susan Wallman, NYC, May 2011]

Early November
(excerpt)

You streamlined mother morning
Sliding me down a bright aluminum sky
That radiates power from mica-speckled granite
Into steel-barreled trees
And the gray river clay that cloaks the egg
Of next year’s salamander
That will rise and devastate
The foliage in its time,
But only in its time.
My stomach is tight, my skin a mirror,
As I stroke old pages to find the form
Of last year’s salamander,
Groping toward the bottom of the day
Like a fly vagrant in a wine glass,
Uncertain whether I am consuming it
Or it is consuming me.

[Forrest Chisman, 1980s]

for you women

sweet sweet women, with herbs
and baby lettuces in your gardens,
an offering of cucumber plants
and basil stalks, while outside
sirens blare. if the lettuces can hear,
they don’t seem to mind. the
cucumbers stay crisp and sweet.
come lay by the grasses, by the tree root
on your small patch of earth, come hear
the hum and buzz of life moving around us.

[Aja Beech]
[in tribute to her Uncle Ken]

Seasonal Musings
(excerpts)

Spring: Early Spring—Still Life

A bevy of bickering, branching birds
chafe the air with resinous cries
a flutter of fiercely feathered words
cursing the ambiguous skies.

Summer: Petunias

Petunias bloom in the stone pot,
pink, blue, white polyglot,
fragile though they may seem to be,
they simulate eternity.

They blow and batten in the pot,
pink, blue, white polyglot,
and do not care a single crumb
for what is past and what’s to come.

Autumn: October

A lone bird chirps
ceaselessly
a bar that has no melody
but simple records out of key
October’s special clarity.

Winter: Pink and Purple Hydrangeas

How reassuring in December
Faced with winter’s blind rages
To know that earth will remember
Pink and purple hydrangeas.

[Harry Weinstock, 1965 & 1970s]

Mail Call, Madrid, NM, 2009

Blue Vases with Mums, 2006

Pink Rose, 2006

Trees and Snow, 2006

Tulips, 2006

White Rose, 2006