Painting
My friend James said it would be scary
If there wasn’t a poet who was stricken unto silence
Sometimes, and the poems won’t come
In the silence
And that’s normal
Or something to that effect
He is my doctor
The poems are my memory and when they won’t come I don’t have any
Is that true
Should it be
He said make a painting
I write a long bar of red
Like an unnatural coal or molten
Rod of iron
Annie I am trying to get this horse out of the stable
Megalithic culture
Of girders and impediments
Spongy or soft
Crouched weirdly above, silently
Owlish
Shaped like letters from alphabets that don’t exist yet
In utilitarian tongues
After the literature is done
And the sad breast of a whale
Green
Flaking
Curves back against the sun
And its raptures
Why I must always know what things are
Read, write, written
The circuitry lifelong
My painting is the FDR
Two green moons hang there on their poles
And there walk giants
Cranking their giant mechanical shadows
Neoamerican
They called it
The heights staggered
To let down the visible
Unto the glass’s sediment
Densely to drop
From stepped
Canyons or
Desiring to see something
Leant off the edge
Painting
When I get to my car
Parked
Its front wheels a bit cocked
On Nostrand Avenue
At twelve forty two
Or twelve forty three am
It looks like me
And so I have trouble recognizing it
In its shiny
Messy exterior
Brown
Faintly sparkly
Like the margins
Of a pond. My car
Has its few
Dents
I haven’t caused
Or seen caused
But recognize. The pond
Its strange
Cold springs
And vents. My car
Is shorter than I believe it to be.
It crouches by the curb.
I get into it. What is this
State of being a car, pond
Or human being?
Does my car want me
As I want people?
Once
I took my dog
On a walk
In the woods.
We came to a place
Where the woods
Opened.
Some
Road had been here once.
The sun stung
The flies buzzed
And everything was yellow.
My dog stamped
In a puddle, his paws
Indulgent to the matter, like
The hands of
A potter, and
As I looked closer
I saw
The world they
Split, under
The weird pads
And curved nails
A form of life
That had been
Like some drama I had half
Apprehended
But not accounted for
Occurring beside us all
Along, in
The silty blur. Among
The golden blur
Scribbled with
Symbols
In weed and drifting
Leaf, many
Salamanders
Shot up, from
Between the nails, and
Ran, like
Paint, from between the
Colossus nails, which were
I saw then, the
Sleek tusks of
Other, new-born species.
I saw
Elephants. Golden
The leaves
Spun
To take it. Things tend
To take it in. They
Do. I
Do not think I wept
To see this thing.
I brought
My dog home
And went to sleep.
We often sleep after
Seeing this kind
Of thing.
Things
Of this kind are
Often such
An anguish.
Claire DeVoogd is a poet. Her first book is Via (Winter Editions 2023). Recent writing appears or is forthcoming in The Colby Review, Mercury Firs, and The New York Review of Books.
