"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

I had no one to play the game with
so I never learned the rules. But they didn’t matter,
they never did. 1970, a board game under the
Christmas tree, just me and stuffed animals and toys
and Masterpiece, a box that held a treasury,
a collection of paintings I’d never seen,
post-card sized landscapes, portraits, still lives,
quietly presenting possibilities of color and shape,
an art-shaped world, an art-colored world
a world of vast collections in hushed salons of
white, red, green walls, worn parquet floors,
a world of mansions and safes and movie-heists,
life lived larger than what I knew, out there somewhere
beyond my sheltered bedroom, the house, our little town.

On a round braided rug on hardwood floors I studied the cards:
arthritic sunflowers in a bulbous orange vase,
cotton candy angels floating in a sepia sky,
a dour farmer with pitchfork and a 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.
Windows not just to other places or times
but other ways of thinking, seeing, believing,
beckoning, imprinting on me, whispering to me,
“no journey is simple, but this one will be long.”
From a child’s game came a slow devotion, an embrace of its language,
a realization that there’s freedom to choose content and then form,
or even more expanding: to choose form for its own sake,
a startling dedication to the physical act of creating.

Did the makers of that game know that I would never play
by their rules using their tissue-thin pastel dollar bills,
but that I would many years later weep in front of works
in museums far from the braided rug by my toy box, 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?
Did the makers of that game hope—did just one of them on that team even dare to guess
that I would raise my hand with a brush loaded with pigment
to participate in this evolutionary urge to create using the
language of form color texture repetition symmetry asymmetry the head the heart

©JEF 2025