Lesley Wheeler
Copyright Lesley Peterson
(USA)
When you come down to bare boards
Ashevak, Beuys
If we are not our work, why
is that cur growling in my head?
Want, want, he thinks, or maybe
he embodies thought. Hook and eye:
look how we become our chairs.
Each interdigitated hour a tooth
in the bleeding zipper. We patch
art and life together but any smile,
any seam, can fray. Sometimes
our fingers really do lace each line
with an ease that must be joy.
The next minute, an iris becomes
a button of doubt, misery even,
exceeding the hole it must inhabit.
D’ailleurs, c’est toujours les autres qui meurent
Madonna, Beuys, Duchamp
In the pupil of everyone you love, discover
a letter, like the icon on a typewriter key.
In the April grass, see a robin’s egg oozing
blond yolk. Spring is a good time to consider
transition, movement, damage: every hour
a blossom lost, a leaf gained. Today
police found the marathon bomber dying
in a boat. No one can translate his eyes.
I have a problem with keys. Last week I stole
Julia’s, just walked away into the birdsong.
Last night, at 3 a.m., I locked myself out
of my studio, had to pry open a window,
shimmy in, breaking my fall on a chair,
bouncing off the wicker trash bin, both
more forgiving than the concrete floor.
You can do that, crash in careful stages,
while your wriggling legs stick out of a hole
and the egg-faced moon stares blandly down.
Make an art of inching so close to the edge,
the joint of wooden craft and yielding ground,
you can almost decipher the crazed paint.
Trying to make what you can’t think of
Dürer, Sherman, Warhol
Dürer means doormaker. Each image unlocks
a room or closet or rocky shore inside
the artist. I met a colorist losing his vision.
He opened the sliding glass panels and painted
by sunlight. One smoky piece showed traces
of earlier brightness peeping at the edges.
Another was brown over hot pink flashes: the view
from a blooming azalea. A face has several
doors. When a shade comes down he
can’t see out and you can’t see in. What I like
about Portrait of the Artist Holding a Thistle
is a soft determination in the mouth.
Artists are entrepreneurs, yes, they sell
mirrors, dreams, but there’s a haze on the field.
A flung hatch bangs, casts a shadow. Look
how the air beyond moves in layers: heat, a dark
mulch smell, and, humming across
the currents, a bee’s single gleaming eye.
Actions sail away from you
Sherman, Duchamp
The morning teems with pink ships.
Beauty perches in the rigging, ready for her next
adventure: sailing west toward another
kingdom. This one is inverted.
Someone left a suspicious package at the library.
Campus in lockdown. Humor
slouches at the tiller, her feet three long beats
apart, hands loose and confident at the spokes.
Of course, no one actually escapes.
Shut the door, make a picture, the bad
day still gets into it. It gets into you, too,
because you are not your work. Your
memo steers off into the jade distance
with your painted face on the prow, but you are also
left behind on a dangerous beach
where the sand roars back at the shocked sea.
There goes Usefulness, there goes
Delight, and will these shores ever see the like?
Trying To Make What You Can’t Think Of
Opinion Poll
Madonna, Lautrec, Beuys
The green line represents spring’s approval rating.
Our goodwill was chilled by snow around the equinox;
the curve climbs as the yard goes rapidly to seed; now
we start to feel jaded. Who has the ear of a pretty young thing?
Each morning she performs her toilette loosely
wrapped in mist’s drapery, but by early May, anyway,
virginity is a performance we’re meant to see
skeptically. Spring likes to sip absinthe
and watch others wipe glasses or crack whips
or stare off over the laundry. At first we enjoy
the light’s attention but soon it heats and irritates.
What does the idle dancer do but check her phone
and disbelieve in her own transformation?
When You Come Down To Bare Boards
____________________________________________
Bios:
Lesley Wheeler’s poetry collections are The Receptionist and Other Tales, a Tiptree Award Honor Book; Heterotopia, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize; and Heathen. Her poems and essays appear in Subtropics, Gettysburg Review, Rattle, and Poetry, and she blogs about poetry at http://lesleywheeler.org/. Wheeler is the Henry S. Fox Professor of English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.
Carolyn Capps teaches drawing at the University of Virginia and has recently exhibited work at the Chroma Gallery and The Bridge in Charlottesville, Virginia. She grew up in Black Mountain, North Carolina and earned her MFA from the University of Georgia. “We Are Not Our Work” is her first digital collection.
Articles similaires
Tags
Partager
