Blue. Van Gogh.

 

     The horizon line disappears, and I am lost in the sky after the bough breaks. I remember the startle gesture of babies—their reflexive flailing of arms and legs as they tried to regain a grip. In this landscape, I cannot find the door. Any set of lines will help me: branches, leaf fingers, a peripheral blur of field.

     The painter translates his idiom: green means downward. Heaven is upside. So much depends on depth, width, and how high the blue stretches. Mobile clouds cannot hold one position.

     But finally, the painter also succumbs. He inverts himself, like “The Fool” in the tarot card. Blood rushes to his head and turns blue. Leaves open pores to sun and absorb its blue. The painter’s eyes turn the color of heaven, and everything he touches is blue. He is a Midas turning the world blue instead of gold. He creates an indigo-blue prism.

     Like Van Gogh, his background twists into foreground. Blue veins leave his body and ascend. I can call them branches. I can call them pieces of sky. (From 3 Voices, Blue Heron, 2008)

 

Columbarium Garden

 

Cold sun brings this mourning season to an end

one year since my mother’s death. Last winter thaw

my brother shoveled clay-dirt, she called it gumbo,

over powdery substance the crematorium sent us

 

not her, but fine, lightened granules—all else

rendered into invisible elements. That handful

from the pouch, un-boxed, was tucked into plotted soil,

the churchyard columbarium, under a brass plaque

 

and brick retaining wall, scant semblance of permanence.

Now my mother is a garden—lilies and chrysanthemums

feeding from that slight, dampened, decomposing ash.

Her voice stilled. One ruddy robin in the grass, dipping.

 

 

 

My Grandfather Raises Rabbits

 

In his exile my Lenape grandfather raised rabbits—

angora, cinnamon, French lop with downturned ears.

The spirit of rabbits— Muschgingus—never came to him

but plenty of fur-coated, meaty animals bred

in the backyard cages stacked across the lot.

He dressed them out at ten pounds and traded

for milk and eggs. He entered the fair for cash.

 

The Depression deepened but rabbits cared nothing

about money, only slant of winter sun, water

and the smell of littermates. They ate anything green

and quietly watched him move about the pens

as he stayed away from his brothers and mother,

as, in town, he learned to get by on his own.