The Potato in Me
What if it’s not a poet in me, but a potato that lies mute, still as a stone, stiff with all that starch, sweet beyond all blessed belief? Yet doomed for some inevitable and — yes! — edible destiny. And would all my words abandon me? All my days above ground have not prepared me for this single moment of roundness being next to soundness, of brownness being wholly skin deep and just as easily bruised. A fist, a hand in glove, a hardened heart. Half-baked, I see more than I am believing; I have the lumps to prove it. So what about grief? Don’t ask me. I only said...
Read MorePick a Path with Heart
the Chinese fortune cookie fortune said, meaning with all my soul, with all my strength, with all the fortitude I could muster. Just that much courage. I’ve always known this rhythm my feet make, the left, right, left, depending on the pavement with Loose Strife on the shoulders of the road, Robins dotting the margins like emphatic punctuation marks. Mourning doves coo; cardinals provide that vital splash of color. Gravel, asphalt, clay, or dirt, how to choose? When there’s always that fifty-fifty chance for rain, for rubble and construction, for mud and its myriad distractions...
Read MoreThe Ghosts in the Mountain
In Zhang Daquan’s famous forgery, Drinking And Singing at the Foot of a Precipitous Mountain, the trees themselves have drunk too much, have climbed too high, have spun themselves around the winding paths one too many times. Scrub brush now clings on hands and knees while vertigo sets in. Everything is lush and leafy; even the pine trees gloat. Above them all, red chop marks float like bright kites on invisible strings. Just another scene from ancient China, courtesy of distressed silk. Distant hummocks, clouds, drifting smoke and mist, attenuated cascades all careen into varying shades...
Read MoreThe Woman with Green Eyes
“The Girl with Green Eyes” by Henri Matisse a Madam X with no other name, like most of Matisse’s women stares back at him; she’s hardly camera-shy. She has donned a special hat for the occasion, deep-crowned and shallow-brimmed with a contrasting riband. You can barely tell that she parts her auburn hair on the side. Her neck is completely covered up to her chin by a white collar, stiff as a wooden bobbin, but definitely larger than life size. She refuses to smile. Perhaps, it is because her lipstick has smeared the corners of her mouth. Or she is...
Read MoreHow to Read a Cat
Marguerite Matisse (“Girl with a Black Cat”) by Henri Matisse She holds the cat in her lap like an open book she has often stooped to read. She’d read it now, if she had one more set of hands. Instead, she runs her hands over the soft fur as if her fingers could read this new kind of Braille, decode the Morse signals of its purr that tumble through its lush coat. In other words, anagrams of contentment written in the darkest kind of ink. The fact that it is all black and sleeps on her lap almost everyday has taught her to sit up in her straight back chair, ignore the...
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