in a room of priceless art
I keep turning toward
my daughter’s smile
Posts Tagged ‘Art’
One Unframeable
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, daughter, focus on May 17, 2025| 2 Comments »
Amidst the Cold of Winter
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, darkness, family, ice, light, memory, play, river, winter on July 23, 2024| 12 Comments »
There was that winter day when the ice floe
had cracked the river ice into giant slabs
thick as my open hand, tall as a child.
Our family gathered on the river bank
and played with the fractured chunks to make
sculptures—ice huts and ice caves and
a long ice wall that curved and snaked
through the snow along the river’s edge
like the spine of a giant stegosaurus,
jagged and upright. It’s never happened
again. The ice slabs always freeze together
or crush into bits, but that night,
we went out with dozens of candles
and lit the ice structures from within.
And the glow then, the gold that blazed
through the ice, was the kind of luminous
magic that winter seldom knows. What
was shattered and sharp, heavy and cold,
became radiance, brilliance, a visible hope
I didn’t yet know I would need, some proof
of what might transpire in the winter
of the heart—how broken and frigid,
it still might become a means
to gather beauty, to amplify the light.
In Art Class Making Aspen Trees
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, aspen, fixing, healing, painting on February 10, 2024| 12 Comments »
for Kellie Day
Everything is fixable,
said Kellie, as she
sprayed her painting
with water, then
held the canvas
on its side until
white paint streaked
across her forest, and
for six hours I lived
in that fixable world
of paint and paper
and brushes and
stencils, a world
of improvisation
and play, a world
where I wandered
in pale green and
deep blue, where
I trusted a glade
of my own making,
rested in that shade
where there were
no problems, just
new invitations to
reimagine what
might happen next,
and smudges became
birds, and tears became
trees, and my sorrow
became an aspen
grove where nothing
was fixed, but for six
sacred hours there
was nothing the
light couldn’t touch.
Two Thousand Three Hundred Thirty-two Miles from Home
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, friendship, life, museum, surprise on November 24, 2023| 12 Comments »
for Brad & James
There in the lobby of the Musée des Beaux Arts,
I walked out of an exhibit to find my daughter
sitting on a long bright red couch
beside the sweet husband of my beloved friend.
And though I enjoyed each curated installation we saw,
nothing compared to this art of surprise, of love.
It was like stepping into the museum of my own life,
reseeing how every minute might be something of great value,
unexpected and wonderful, a moment I’d like to frame
just so I can remember how beautiful it can be,
how much larger than life it can be, this life.
Why I Read Poems
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, poetry, reading on January 19, 2023| 9 Comments »
It is so little, I think,
what a few words can do,
and yet today,
after reading
a very small poem
my heart opened so wide
a whole life rushed through—
such a current of love,
somehow contained
in the banks
of so few words.
It carried me,
that tiny poem,
as I walked through snow,
carried me as I wept,
carried me as I taught
and planned and paid bills.
It carried me as if
I were a Roman general
in a chariot, carried me
as if I were Venus on a wave,
carried me as if I were me,
a woman grateful to be carried
through a day by a poem,
its words not only
cradling this heart,
but becoming the heart itself.
Change in Perspective
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, body, form, perspective, shape on November 2, 2022| 6 Comments »
Everything is made of simple forms,
said the art teacher—
a car, the body, everything.
And for the first time in my life,
I saw myself as an assemblage
of cylinders, spheres, cubes and cones.
It was thrilling, after fifty-three years,
to break down the body this way—
to see my fingers as stems,
my cheekbones as grapes,
my calves as long pinecones.
And for a moment, it all seemed so simple.
I am a constellation of forms that moves
through a larger constellation of forms.
For a moment, I didn’t think of the shapelessness
of ashes that conform to the cube of a box.
For a moment, I knew that wetness
falling from my eyes as just another sphere.
Love Letter to Vincent
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, beauty, ekphrasis, Kayleen Asbo, Van Gogh on July 25, 2022| 6 Comments »
Oh Vincent,
There is in my heart
a small yellow room
with a small wooden table
with a dull yellow cloth
and a rounded clay vase
with your name scrawled in blue,
and it’s bursting with sunflowers,
all of them open, all of them turning,
turning toward the light,
which is to say the flowers face every which way.
There is light everywhere we dare to turn.
Consider this a love letter, Vincent,
a letter sent back in time,
a letter that impossibly arrives
just when you despair,
just when you believe no one cares about your art,
the letter that reaches you to say you are loved
in that exact moment you feel unlovable.
Let this be the letter in which you see
the sunflowers you sowed a hundred thirty years ago
have re-seeded themselves in me
and now grow rampant in my days,
golden petalled and flagrantly lovely.
And your stars, swirling, your wheat fields goldening,
your cypress reaching, your church bells unsinging,
you will find them all my words.
This is how love replants itself—
more love, old friend, more love.
Because you were so truly you,
so full of hope, so full of fear,
because you risked your everything,
I, too, will risk, will dare.
Consider this a love letter, Vincent,
the one that helps you see
how your life is linked to eternity.
Let this be a letter that says thank you, Vincent,
for teaching us new ways to see beauty.
Perhaps this letter will arrive
when you are in the yellow room,
or perhaps the asylum, perhaps in Neuwen,
and you, surprised to find it addressed to you,
will receive it and let the words in,
then hear your own startled voice saying,
It matters? as you pick up your brush
and begin again.
*
My dear friend composer/pianist/historian Kayleen Asbo and I want to offer you the video recording of our hour-long conversation about Vincent Van Gogh, loss and The Art of Creative Collaboration– click here.This project has been such an important part for each of us in holding on to hope and beauty during a dark and challenging time. If it speaks to a part of your own aching soul and you want to share it, you have our blessing to forward it to whomever you wish.
If you want to offer a donation in support of our work so that we can professionally record our project in both audio and video format, click here for our Go Fund Me account. And we have an anonymous donor who will match all funds donated before July 30!
If you want to engage in the full collaboration–Vincent’s paintings, Kayleen’s music, and my poems–I hope you will join us in “Love Letters to Vincent” on July 29, the day Vincent died, at 11 a.m. mountain time. We will present the entire collaboration, sending love letters back in time to honor this man who changed the way we see beauty. There will also be a chance to participate in a group creative activity, responding to his work, creating a giant love letter for Vincent. Sliding scale. It will be recorded and sent to all who register.
Looking at Van Gogh’s “Wheat Field with Cypresses”
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, change, ekphrasis, Kayleen Asbo, Van Gogh, wind on May 16, 2022| 9 Comments »
while listening to Kayleen Asbo’s “Cypresses”
The wind, that knows itself only by what
it touches, does not whip your hair
as it churns through the wide golden wheat fields,
does not steal your hat as it tosses
the clouds into frothy white and violet whorls,
does not slap your face as you stare
at the silver-green branches of olive trees
upswept into turbulent curves. You’re just looking.
Until you realize the wind has breached the frame
and touched you the way it touches all that it loves,
and your heart knows what it perhaps wishes
it did not know—that all is changed and rearranged,
all gets stirred up and remade, even the cypress,
even the mountains, even the stubborn heart.
you can see the painting here
Visiting the Marble Sculptor’s Symposium, Marble, CO
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, creativity, Marble, sculpture on July 7, 2021| 4 Comments »
We watch as the sculptors pitch
and chisel, splitting the stone
to separate what is wanted
from what is not.
The marble, recently quarried,
is still soft. Can be worked, refined,
polished. As we watch, horses
emerge from one large block.
A dragon appears in another.
There—eyes. There—a hand.
There—a rabbit’s ear. Marble
dust hangs in the air
and the rhythmic beat of mallets
rings out a creation song.
I like best the statues
that appear unfinished—
a roughened breast,
an incomplete cheek,
smooth innuendo of a fold in a dress.
I swear I feel my own story
being chiseled by some great hand,
the block of my life not yet hardened,
not completely. Here the rasp of grief,
here the riffler of joy to enhance the shape
of my days—I am yet a suggestion
of what I will become.
It takes so much breaking to find
the final form.
It takes so much abrasion
to bring out the shine.
The Price of Nothing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, Art, nothing, space on June 7, 2021| 6 Comments »
for “the lucky buyer” who “went home with a certificate of authenticity” for an “immaterial sculpture” by Salvatore Garau
What could be more valuable
than nothing? The nothing that
frames “The Thinker,” the nothing
that holds every bowl,
every vase, every bust, every thought.
Let others buy the clay, the steel,
the papier-mâché. I will be satisfied
with nothing more than nothing.
Nothing pleases me. Nothing
enchants me. Nothing,
as Heisenberg says,
has a weight. Just think
of the space here beside me
where you are not.
If someone asks me why
I have a five-by-five-foot
empty space taped off in my home
with a plaque that says I Am,
it is because I am so in love
with nothing. Imagine it—
nothing, the color of happiness,
nothing, the size of love,
nothing, the shape of god.
This poem was published in Rattle’s Poet’s Respond on June 13, 2021