Bronwen, Painter of Miccasukee Street
Walking in the just-thereness of afternoon,
Scrubbed out by the Tallahassee sun,
Past the same
Shocking banana trees that have been
The most dramatic occurrences all year
Since her move from the north,
She thinks we must stop life,
Cut it into stills, so the emptiness
Between them let's each tree, each afternoon
Stand up for itself….
She remembers, amazed:
It's the same thought she had when living
In a cold map-like city of friends
Pale from art.
Short palm trees fluff up
Their wings like the mockingbird
Who shadow-scares worms.
Palm shadows have grown up
And solidified as feathery trunks
They've been at it so long,
Still as deChirico's shadow.
The line of live oaks is beyond all that,
Impossibly sublime, out of their surroundings—
Flat miles of white buildings.
She is not crowded now with intense friends
Loving her for their very perverse reasons,
Adulterous people who could believe with her
The Spanish moss on the random trees
Is really a rayonist painting
By Natalia Goncharova, scissors
Of arrested motion.
The group of friends used to look
At gallery pictures in basements
For their answers…
They'll believe the photo she sent them
More than anything she says, as it is flat
And still.
A crowded northern thought
Of cutting life into pieces
Is not the same thought
In an emptiness between palm trees
And more palm trees.
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Author's Note
Published in Memphis State Review
I wrote this one when getting my MA and teaching at Florida State University.
I was influenced by French Nouveau Roman author Claude Simon's novel Triptyque. In that book, some boys find strips of film and cut them up into individual images.
They thus create space between moments and allow the person to take a step back from them and shuffle them on command.
I found that to be similar to poems in a collection, and this one was part of my master's thesis called Scissors of Arrested Motion, named after that novel and this poem. I loved the white space between the poems that cut life up.
That kind of psychological exercise creates freedom in a person.
It's a similar exercise to breathing in and out with Tantra yoga, delving consciousness down into the unconscious nada that each moment arises out of like a sine wave.
There's an authority to this poem in both content and form that is very impressive. "she thinks we must stop life." that "we must..." says it, helps make you a believer that both poet and poem know what they mean.
"A crowded northern thought
Of cutting life into pieces
Is not the same thought
In an emptiness between palm trees"
Nice!