Georgia O’Keeffe
There’s going to be an invasion in June. Some kind of
prehistoric flash bathing in tension’s balancing hours.
Depth is not a bad place. Rain and air. The brides of society.
See the swarm’s exposure. The fabulous ochre. The wife’s
permanent body. The smile’s agony in the playing fields.
The poet is a shell. Tasting like clean straw that blooms
and blooms and blooms. This is the work of grownups. To
nurse the dancing shrouds, and to live in suburbia is both
interesting and vague, and words are like a river to a
visual artist. There is a bonfire in my fingers, in my journal,
in missionary work, in the firm roar of the waves. And
the face of fear is like silk. There’s lethargy growing near
the water found in wild places. A scream has fallen into a
cage and cannot get out for some reason. The bones are
lovely there for they have found paradise. My mother, she
licks the chicken bone expertly biting into the white flesh,
the dark meat. In the little hospital they have cancelled
the intimacy of thanksgiving. And in my throat, there is a
fire-breathing dragon that uses its lungs as a weapon. And
days turn into afterthoughts, when all I am thinking of is
the man, or, the work, or, the writing of this poem that
pushes away the pulse of broken heavy water’s darkened
progress. And the bonfire is now the curator of dreams. Visions
turn into the cold, and the cold is a veil over my head. It is
night air, the burning bush, Moses in the lonely wilderness.
I am frozen in the decay of the wild, and the dragon is numb
now. It says nothing. I say nothing. I seem to fear nothing
after all. I am not that young anymore. Not that fashionable
young thing. The older I get, the more responsible I become.
The less of love I have in my life. The more people I lose to
death, to death. You are too cold and accomplished, you have
the body and tongue of a vampire, and there’s a hidden sadness
in your existence. The grocer is barren, barren. The butcher a
brute. It is this love, your love of flowers that saves me.
Trees are free, but I don’t feel free. I feel overwhelmed and
captured by the bonfire. It protects me. Veil, and hats are raised.
The magician is touched and old, but I love him still. There
is a quiet respect there. Any daughter would love her father if
there was a code involved. Everything looks different in the
light. I took my notebook outside and watched the child at
play. His observations became my own. I could feel the despair
of the day in the white sacrifice of the sun. trees stained ancient
and green and part of the rain’s domain. And I turned my body
over to God. Found the solitude in childhood again. The wonder
of growing, the power in gaining knowledge, the vigour of birth
and ghostly stain, how vital the marriage of creative minds is.
And the weedy grass obscures my vision of the addict in me.
The dead have forgotten my flesh and blood, my hair and roots
and the lines on my face have become like empty fields. There
are the hours like the sea, the sigh in the loneliness of the complex.
Dogged hands, dejected and narrow sky seen from my bedroom
even the courage here seems to be a church that has a kind of
primitive stiffness in the joints. There’s a miserable failure for you.
——–
Ernest Hemingway
(a series of twelve experimental haiku)
Gardens of the sun –
I need your fields to survive.
For plants to branch out.
This is the future –
Swim. They do not tell you this.
Wait for adulthood.
Then you will realise –
Backlit bare trees. Patios,
Girls found in Hades.
Barbecues and booze –
Stealing sips of dad’s whisky.
Birches that are cold.
Smelling the meadow –
You will lean against a tree.
Remember childhood.
Swim against torment –
You live with grief. Desire. Praise.
You play Say please me.
Gardens of the sea –
I need your schools of tuna.
Without meaning to say it.
Ongoing lighthouse –
You do not even know it.
The back of my hand.
Anticipating –
The green shoots in those regions.
Vines cry out for rain.
Open your journal –
He was going to kiss me.
He was my compass.
I touched the mirror –
Nothing can hurt your love song.
The landscape quivered.
The first word was sky –
The next ‘muddy blue arrows’.
Light. A myriad.
——–
Poems (c) Abigail George
Image: MS Co-Pilot AI remixed