"Art"

In honor of National Poetry Month, I have posted work by myself each Friday. This poem is brand new after rattling around in my head for a few months and a few weeks of work, and I think it tells its own story. I hope you enjoy it.

Art

Did the makers know it wasn’t a game they made
but a life lived larger, out there somewhere
beyond the shelter of my bedroom, the house, our little town?
Christmas morning, 1970, stuffed animals, toys, and a box,
a treasury on post-cards: landscapes, portraits, still lives, portals
to different places and times.

Did the makers hope to bestow a gift:
the freedom to choose content, then form, or more radical,
the ability to choose form for its own sake?
On a round braided rug on a hardwood floor I studied
this collection of masterpieces I’d never seen
from museums far from the rug and my toy box,
learning to think and see in a new world,
an art-shaped world, an art-colored world, a world
of mansions and safes and movie-heists,
vast collections in hushed salons of
white, red, green walls on worn parquet.
A future event: I will raise my brush wet with pigment, touch canvas.
It whispers back now, “no journey is simple, but this one will be long.”

The slow embrace of a language, a joining with
arthritic sunflowers in a bulbous orange vase,
cotton candy angels floating in a sepia sky,
a dour farmer with pitchfork and mournful wife,
a green-faced barmaid in a raucous dance hall,
whips of black and white paint slashing a surface,
umbrella-ed couples on a wet cobblestone street,
a bleached cow skull on white sandstone,
a bright diner counter seen from an eerie, dark city.

I never learned their dice and tissue-thin pastel dollar rules,
they didn’t matter, I had no one to play a game with anyhow.
I didn’t yet know a future where I would weep in front of a
small, tenderly ordered bedroom in Arles with a yellow chair,
in front of a dizzying cascade into a pond of pink-purple-blue
water lilies rendered in rushed gobs of paint like cake frosting,
in front of a geometry of sunlight slicing through windows into an empty room
and feel the primal urge to use form color texture repetition symmetry
asymmetry the head the heart

©JEF 2025