"Canvas" and "Trio of Makers"

Canvas

I.
 
Before we painted the sky with our words, it was a wild
canvas, brimming with opportunity. Before we graced
the pages and our lips with the words orange, almond,
amaranth, bruised, the sky was empty. Humans were
the first to conceptualize color—or so we have written.
We spoke it into being by seeing it and pointing—
look, a shard of verdant shadows, a looking glass
filled with a kaleidoscope of philology. Before we engraved
our world with our lips, we learned to use our eyes.
 
II.
 
I licked a stripe down my own skin, savoring the saltiness of
being human. We are creatures of the sea; my hands once
hauled me out of inky black water. I am not a creation myth.
We learned to lay eggs before we learned to be women. Lines
ribbon across my body like growth rings on a tree. I learned the
curves of my body, the way it folds and creases, the blood and
tissue it expels—-and hated it. I wanted to tear my womb out.
I preferred the gaping, weeping hole to the suffering my own
organs bring me. My mother held me while I cried, the product
of her womb denouncing their own. I can only imagine how she felt,
in the gentle sweep of her hand against my forehead and her
whispered pleas for my mind. It was only by chance that she was
split wide open on the operating table before I was, organs laid
bare and cancer stripped from her with paint thinner.
 
III.
 
Blue thrush moons enshroud my canvas. I bring words to life,
paint them between splotches of color, draw myself in trembling
prose. I have failed this aspiration. I etherized my forebears
in a field of dianthus and rhododendron. I slashed across
the canvas of Elliot’s wasteland, dragged myself through
the carafe of Stein’s insanity, curled around the agony of
Plath’s ruptured notebook. Call me by my name: Poet. Artist.

Trio of Makers

I. Blackout (Poetry)
 
Stare at the aspens, what they
never failed to see, you see that
we’ve failed. The trembling leaves
are tongues whispering their true name
in their language.
 
Sex is rarely
personal for you.
And quirkiness. You’re
techno-oriented so
sex toys help the
job. Favorite position: any
that allows you to see pleasure.
 
An emotional sponge tends
to gentle lovers. You read the
body age so nothing gets past you.
 
II. Weaver
 
Coconut skin warps around
your pinkie finger. Dip your toes
into a vat of indigo and pull them
out gold. You are a god. You are
Midas but everything you touch
turns red red red, splatter your
madder root paste dripping with
blood over a canvas of rabbit fur.
Pull tightly now, nestle each strand
of sinew and muscle tight to the
bone. You are remaking the dead.
You might be dead yourself. Satan
does not claim you, goddess.
Genderless, featureless, emotionless,
pull the strings tighter! Weave
weave weave a vase with a sharp
candle flame. Indigo turns to blood-gold.
 
III. Longs Peak
 
Alpine trees are stunted. One sided. Close-minded
and clustered in groups of five. All the trees are pines.
Their needles scatter the freeze-dried soil, cut through
with splashes of aureolin mules ears, hooded purple
columbines hanging themselves by their thin green
stems, and volcanic scarlet gilia opening their extended
petals in an imitation of a mole’s nose. We’re all drowning
in puddles of glacier lilies. The snow is packed ice.
 
Wind is the alpine tree’s enemy. But in this landscape,
they are full and made of lucious paint brush strokes.
Indulgence drips off the canvas in the brilliant reflection
of the sun and the gentle blue sky. In the mountains the
sky is angry and strangles every living creature, plant,
animal, fungi, bacterium. To live there you have to learn
to live while the noose pulls at your lungs, forever threatened
and blue-lipped as bundles of lupine. Mountain marigolds gasp
their last breath in June, the cruelest month at 10,000 feet.
 
“What has roots as nobody sees,
Is taller than trees,
Up, up it goes,
And yet never grows?”
~Gollum, The Hobbit
 
The answer to the riddle is not mountain. Mountains grow,
fed with rivers of ravenous lava and shifting tectonic plates.
Mountains are violence. The artist painted a murder on
canvas, but there is no blood coating Marat’s shriveled
chest; David doesn’t need the severed head of Goliath
to prove this bloodshed. The Rocky Mountains are a
winding scar draped across the back of Plath’s colossus.
 
This artist swept a brushstroke and created a tooth scraping
the sky, plastered with artificial whitener, the peak shrouded in
clouds of white paint, the fumes of oil billowing grotesquely.
There is no mountain so perfect, no tree so tall
or brimming with sweeping pine needles, the lake a shade
of unattainable turquoise. There are no wildflowers in this
grand masterpiece, the sky is muted and clouded.
 
The artist ignored the violence of creation. The scars
tangle across the open fields, a chunk of rock lodged
in the earth, cliffs carved through granite walls, icy lakes
trapped high in the peaks, the only sustenance in an fridgid
desert. Glaciers carved violence, mountains speared the
sky. The artist is a maker of violence.