You thought you could erase our affair
the way you erased from his painting my face,
but everyone knew it was me—
my head flung back in laughter,
my gaze on his lips as he painted my bliss.
Perhaps it’s his child who runs
now through my rooms. Perhaps not.
I remember his hands,
his firm touch as he moved
my body just so, just so. Oh so very just so.
I remember knowing it would never be forever.
I didn’t cry when I let him go.
Aline, I am not your worry.
Still, he will never forget me.
I gave myself completely to him for a time.
That kind of joy stains us through.
Makes us new. To erase me,
you would erase him, too.
Posts Tagged ‘Art’
Suzanne Valadon Speaks to Renoir’s Wife
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, ekphrases, erasure, seduction, suzanne valadon on March 11, 2026| 2 Comments »
One Unframeable
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, daughter, focus on May 17, 2025| 2 Comments »
in a room of priceless art
I keep turning toward
my daughter’s smile
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
Anna Akhmatova Speaks After the Revolution
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged anna akhmatova, Art, poem, poetry, Russia on April 27, 2018| 3 Comments »
We dreamed of revolution.
What came to Russia was terror,
terror that left us voiceless,
faceless, betrayed.
Blood in the streets.
Blood splattered on boots.
Blood that stank like blood.
I stood seventeen months
in prison lines three hundred women long,
waited to plead with the hangman
for my son. Seventeen months
I listened to the scrape
of the iron key that never
opened the lock.
Leave, said my friends
as they fled our land,
Leave Russia forever, they said.
But I could no more leave
the birches and pines,
the high mountains and endless steppes,
no, I could no more leave
the Russian people
than I could leave my own skin.
The government called me
an anachronism. They snarled,
“half nun, half whore.” They claimed
I contributed nothing to communism.
Burned my books. Forbid me
to publish more.
They killed my ex-husband.
My next husband, too.
They claimed intelligence
was a sin.
But when we’re silenced,
that’s the summons for our voice to grow,
and I went from the voice
of one woman wanting
to the voice of over
a hundred million mouths screaming,
screaming for freedom, for justice, for life.
They thought that by corseting my words
they could contain them. But they thought wrong.
Now, I whisper poems into the ears of my friends
and my words travel on, become living poems,
poems that throng in the streets.
Poems that stand in line and speak
to the women with blue lips who wail.
Poems that turn into ribbons
that flutter beyond the butcher’s reach.
Poems that slip beneath locked doors
that speak of suffering, futile war.
Now I know what art is for.
Expressionism
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, jackson pollock, poem, poetry on September 11, 2017| 4 Comments »
Let me be the canvas, then,
and you be Jackson Pollock—
be the wild one, the one
who burns, the one who
never sleeps and never yawns,
the one who steals the sun
and gives it to me.
Be the one who transforms me
again and again with colors,
ardent and avid and mad—
no, let me be the canvas,
and let life be the painter,
and you, you be the paint.
Next Chapter
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, books, parenting, poem, poetry, understanding on February 21, 2017| 4 Comments »
Mom, she says, Stop crying.
She’s embarrassed for me.
I can’t stop. After three hours
of snuggling on the green couch,
we are nearing the end of our book,
where the silverback gorilla
and the baby elephant say goodbye
to the girl who has helped them
leave their cages. It is not
the farewell that makes me weep,
though that, too, but the way
that the girl and the gorilla
share a passion for art. It’s so good,
I say to my girl between sniffs,
it’s so rare and so good to find someone
who really understands you.
She looks at me as if she will never
comprehend how such a thing
could make someone cry.
My tears land on the end of the chapter,
leaving a wet trail I don’t
expect her to follow, not yet,
her small hand already
pushing on mine to turn the page.
Throwing Away the Canvas
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, blank verse, poem, poetry, time, unrhymed sonnet on January 8, 2017| 1 Comment »
A response of sorts to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18
Not that I wasn’t fond of it—the blues
and golds and thick brush strokes—perhaps it was
because I was so fond of it I threw
the art away, that life-size portrait of
eternal summer, mine, the painting in
which one hand reaches for the sun, the other
grows dark roots into the earth. Now all
that lives of those bright lines are these two hands
that painted them. With something less than care
I rolled the canvas tight and took it to
the trash, the company of grapefruit rinds
and last year’s mail. By tea, I’ve gotten used
to how the wall looks—empty, open, free—
already dreamed what else these hands might do.
If You Can’t Make it to the Gallery …
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, ekphrastic poetry, Gallery 81435, Jill Sabella, poem, poetry, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer on October 14, 2016| Leave a Comment »
then you can enjoy the show right here on your screen. Last week was the opening of In Three Lines, a collaboration in art and poetry, at Gallery 81435 in Telluride.
I recommend listening to cello while you look through these images … that is what we had playing in the gallery, and the rich and resonant tone of the instrument seemed the perfect partner to these intimate and provocative pieces.
Here is a link to the pieces that are still available for sale, and if you look around the site, you will find that you can see the whole show. Thanks to the gallery for putting together this virtual tour.
The show is done in partnership with Snowmass artist Jill Sabella. For two years, we have been corresponding to create this comprehensive body of work. We took turns sending each other three-line inspirations. The pieces in white came first, and the pieces in beige were responses.
You can purchase books at wordwoman.com. And for more information about the artist, visit her website here. 
Art Opening: In Three Lines
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, ekphrasis, poem, poetry on October 3, 2016| Leave a Comment »
Here’s a bit of information about the upcoming show, In Three Lines and (I hope) book launch for Even Now … Thank you Telluride Inside & Out!
The Art of Less
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, ekphrasis, Jill Sabella, poem, poetry, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Telluride Art Walk, three lines on September 8, 2016| 2 Comments »
October 6
Art Opening: In Three Lines
Telluride, CO
81435 Gallery, 6-9 p.m.
For two years I have been collaborating with artist Jill Sabella, experimenting with simplicity—a leaning toward less and the more that blossoms out of it. We took turns sending each other work to respond to. The result: 45 intimate pairings, in which three-line drawings and three-line poems reflect each other. Some are framed individually and others framed in conversations of three. Our vision: Elegant. Provocative. Inviting. Poignant. The artwork began with charcoal thoughts, and later the same drawings were done on rice paper with Sumi ink and brush.
In addition to the framed artwork, the pairings have been made into a book, even now (Lithic Press, 2016), which will be available in just a few weeks!
The pieces will be for sale in the gallery. If you are curious about purchasing a piece but are not able to make the show, I will help you see the images to make your selection. Single pieces are $250 and triptychs are $800. The show will be up until the first week of December. For more information, contact Molly Perault, 728-3930 or molly@Telluride Arts.org or Rosemerry at 970-729-1838, rosemerry@wordwoman.com
A Lesson in Shading
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, darkness, light, poem, poetry, shadow on October 1, 2015| 1 Comment »
So first, you imagine the light bulb,
he says, then he draws one on the page
so I won’t have to imagine too hard.
And then, he says, you draw a dark line
under the object, assuming that there
will not be much light underneath it.
He moves his pencil forcefully
to darken the bottom of the square.
Next, he says, you move your hand
as far from the light as possible
and make it darker there.
I watch as he fills in the spaces
where white has been.
There is something vital
in all of us that leans toward the dark.
I notice the depth that the shadows
have brought to the page, so like the shadow
into which we are pulled and pulled.
Even now, the darkest parts of us
are kindling our greatest light.
And So It Goes
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, Denisovan people, jewelry, poem, poetry on May 11, 2015| 1 Comment »
Thirty thousand years before the Stone Age,
someone made a bracelet of chlorite.
In the sun, the same sun that we know,
the bracelet glittered and reflected the rays.
In the night, just as dark and steep
as our night, the bracelet cast a deep shade
of green. Green, even then, was the color
of growth and new life. And the bracelet,
say the scientists, would have been worn
as protection from evil spirits. Not much has changed,
really, though the Denisovan people are long,
long gone from the caves in Siberia, gone
from the planet forever. But I think of how they,
like the homo sapiens, were moved
to make beauty. How they, too, perhaps stood
outside on a clear spring night
and felt the wind, the bright slap of the stars,
the possibility that art might save us.
http://www.sott.net/article/296220-40000-year-old-bracelet-made-by-extinct-human-species-found