Notice, says the docent,
how the slash of flesh
creates a diagonal across the canvas.
This creates movement,
he explains, makes the painting
dynamic, more alive.
The slash is Jesus. His naked body
is clearly not alive. His blood
has stilled inside the pale skin.
The people around him
wear the pink stain of anguish,
behind them the sky skews toward black.
After forty four years,
I have never seen a dead body
unaltered by a mortician.
This is a fact aided by luck,
a small family, and a national obsession
with pushing death away.
Every hour, 6,319 people die.
Every minute, 105. Every second,
1.8. Excluding natural disasters.
Though it would be more polite
to say that 1.8 people passed.
Or 1.8 people breathed their last.
Or that 1.8 people departed.
Though since you started to read
this poem, over 60 people have
died, no matter what we call it.
All this perhaps explains why today
I noticed so many things
on the diagonal. The mountains,
of course. The sloping bangs
on the face of the girl. The tilt
of your voice as you greeted me.
The wine as it agreed with the angle
of the tipping glass. I noticed them because
I only this week learned have learned to notice the angle
of things, and perhaps because I am learning, too,
to notice the false guarantees.
On days such as these, I wake
and think, my god, what a gift to wake up,
what a windfall, this cold floor,
this dark of the morning
before the sun leans through the dark
to slant its faraway light into our room.
good one. the time of the year-light still dying out sometimes encourages me to thoughts like this. i’m attaching a poem from a few years ago.
love
“Who would prefer the jingle of jade pendants when once he has heard stone growing in a cliff?” Lao Tzu
The power of Poetry http://www.powerofpoetry.org and Red Thread Gold Thread http://www.redthreadgoldthread.com
Wellspring of Imagination http://www.powerofpoetry.org/wellspring_of_Imagination.htm
Hey sweet friend, this format won’t allow for attachments … will you send it to my other email, please? I’d love to see the poem.
Yup. This. I am almost 44, my friend, and I can feel our similar paths when I read your words. I’m going to email you a poem now. (:
I love the slants of this one, how they begin with that painting and then are refreshed throughout the poem by the more natural diagonals we almost forget to notice. But the sun, yeah, the one we see full on but so easily forget its always at a slant.