Inspired by “Impasse des Deux Frères” by Vincent van Gogh and Kayleen Asbo’s musical response, “Moulins de Gallette.”
Some days, like today, I long for rain,
long for the muted, grey kind of day
that unfolded in the oils of van Gogh,
when he’d stroll through the flat
and quiet daytime streets of Montmartre,
those dreamy hours when the world
is not too bright, not overly exultant,
not too sure of its gaiety,
a day when the wind is the only thing
that feels it needs to move,
when I don’t need to know anything
about anything, can notice how
the world resists resolution,
how the barest scrap of color
can change the whole scene,
can let myself be content to be gray,
can let myself be a student of windmills,
notice how it’s the invisible forces
like silent love, like persistent wind,
that make the whole world spin.
Posts Tagged ‘ekphrasis’
On a Day When Life Feels Black and White
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, ekphrasis, gray, Kayleen Asbo, paris, Van Gogh on May 25, 2022| 10 Comments »
First Steps
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ekphrasis, Kayleen Asbo, love, parenting, Van Gogh on May 20, 2022| 8 Comments »
inspired by “First Steps” (after Millet) by Vincent Van Gogh and a song by the same name by Kayleen Asbo
Precious as the first pale green of spring
those first awkward steps of a child.
How we cheer their innocent tottering.
How we celebrate the very thing
that will lead our child away
from the safety of our arms.
Memory is like a Dutch painter
who insists on portraying
a child’s first steps
in only the loveliest hues,
and the frame contains
only lyrical hope,
and each brush stroke
is dipped in tenderness,
and we don’t yet know
how hard it will be to let go,
how the sweetest songs end
long before the heart is ready.
In the “Wheat Field with Crows”
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, ekphrasis, Kayleen Asbo, possibility, Van Gogh on May 20, 2022| 6 Comments »
inspired by “Wheat Field with Crows” painted by Vincent van Gogh and “Blackbirds” composed by Kayleen Asbo
Oh Vincent, I long to pause with you
where the three paths converge in the wheat field.
We can stand there beneath the sullen sky
like two piano notes side by side,
which, when played at the same time,
rub against each other
in an awkward, uncomfortable music.
Sometimes what unsettles us
is so unbearably beautiful.
I want to meet you in this moment
before you return to a wheat field
with not a brush, but a gun,
want to meet you in this moment
before the choice, before the shot,
this moment when there are still three paths,
all of them leading beyond the frame.
Let’s linger here, Vincent,
beneath the dark arpeggios of crows,
linger here while everything is still possible.
The storm is coming, I see it, too,
turbulent and full of change
while in the honest wheat, look,
you’ve shared so much light, so much gold.
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
Seascape Near Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged color, ekphrasis, grief, Kayleen Asbo, sea, Van Gogh on May 14, 2022| 4 Comments »
inspired by “Seascape near Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer” by Vincent van Gogh and music by Kayleen Asbo, “Les Bateaux de Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer”
Dear Vincent, I wish I could speak of grief
as well as you articulate the colors of the sea,
naming all the hues as they change in the light—
noting the deep ultramarine near the shore
even as it tends toward pale russet, toward violet.
It’s always changing, you wrote to Theo.
You can’t even tell if it’s blue because
a second later the changing light
has taken on a pink or gray tinge.
The same is true of shades of loss—
the moment I identify a deep feeling of sorrow,
I notice pale hints of trust, nuances of awe.
The moment I name it tenderness,
it shifts into pain, ferocity, exhaustion.
Tonight I stared into the seascape you painted
on the shores of the Mediterranean,
and I knew myself not as the water
with its capricious tones, but as the boat
that sails upon it, something transported
by all this change. I tried to see the sea
with the same perspective you had:
It wasn’t very cheery but neither was it sad
it was beautiful.
Oh those blue depths with their emerald, their white.
I let myself be carried by that beauty.
La Berceuse
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ekphrasis, inner child, Kayleen Asbo, lullaby, sleep, Van Gogh, vulnerability on May 12, 2022| 10 Comments »
inspired by “La Berceuse” by Vincent van Gogh and a song by the same name by Kayleen Asbo, with a line from Paul Gaugin
There is, inside all of us,
all of us, all of us,
a child who longs
to be rocked, and rocked,
a soul child who longs
for the old sense of cradling,
a soul infant, fragile,
so green, so new,
who knows only to trust
that someone, someone,
peaceful and still,
someone with patience
and infinite calm,
with a quiet face
and sober eyes
will sit beside us
in heavy-lidded moments
when we glide defenseless
on dim shores of dreams,
yes, someone, someone,
will watch us, will watch,
will keep watch and will usher us
slowly to sleep,
to sleep, though we fight it,
oh shhhh, shhhhh.
Can you feel it, the rocking,
the rocking, the rocking,
can you feel it, the rocking,
that never stops?
Oh bless the hand,
the patient hand,
oh bless the hand
that rocks.
Two Days After I Left the Museum of Modern Art
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, ekphrasis, klimt, life on December 6, 2021| 8 Comments »
after Hope II by Gustav Klimt
I am still thinking of the pregnant woman
on the fifth floor in room five hundred four
in a gold and jewel-toned Byzantine gown
with her eyes closed and her head bowed
down toward her swollen belly. Has she
glimpsed the gray skull attached to her womb?
Is this why her eyes are closed? Did she
somehow guess at what I now know—
that to say yes to a birth is to also say yes
to the death of that child—how the end
is in every one of us from the beginning.
It is right the soon-to-be mother
is nearly naked. This is what birth
and death do to us—no matter how
rich our clothes, we are utterly exposed—
not a damn thing to protect us
from our impermanence. I have fallen
in love with her, this mother to be—
in love with the curl of her fingers,
in love with the flex of her wrist,
in love with her flat and ornate robe,
in love with her delicate face,
and in love with her ripening shape—
this is how the human story goes.
Death hides in all our robes.
It’s the only way to live.
Getting Messy
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ekphrasis, embodiment, face, verbs on December 5, 2020| 2 Comments »
I like when
your eyes haze
with mystery
so I know myself
more sculpturally
and remember
how to brow,
how to jowl,
how to cheek.
I like when
we lip,
more smear
less line,
when we belief
less tidy,
more smudge
more shine.
I love when we
smile through
shadowy mess—
when we face
less certain,
more suggest.
At the National Gallery of Art
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ekphrasis, letting go, love, museum, picasso on October 27, 2020| 2 Comments »
on seeing The Lovers by Pablo Picasso when I was sixteen
Perhaps because I was in love
I fell in love with The Lovers—
fell in love with the way
the man held the woman from behind.
Fell in love with his red,
with her yellow and green.
Fell in love with his gaze,
with the tilt of her head.
I knew what it was like
to be that woman.
Even now, looking
at the painting in pixels,
not in oil on linen,
I feel it—the harmony
of the blue sky behind them,
a sky somehow boundless
inside of them, too.
Thirty years later,
I’m still charged with that blue.
And whatever it is
that forces the woman
to look beyond the frame,
I remember that, too.
It’s as if she can’t quite see
what’s about to happen,
so with one hand,
she holds on to her lover.
With the other, she reaches,
or is she holding herself?
And here’s what I grasp
that she doesn’t yet know—
how hard it will be, how hard
it will be to let go.
The Lovers by Pablo Picasso
Devotion
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged devotion, ekphrasis, Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keefe, love on March 2, 2020| Leave a Comment »
I didn’t know then that devotion
was jumping off the high dive into a pool
though there was no life guard,
though there was no telling
what or who else was in that water.
I didn’t know devotion would mean
tattooing another’s face to my forehead
the way Frida once did with Diego—
how the whole world would be able to see
what I thought was invisible.
I didn’t know devotion meant walking barefoot
into the wind, a wind so strong it shredded my coat.
Didn’t know my destination
would become so unknowable,
would remain so far away.
Perhaps I thought it would be more mechanical—
as if the nuts and bolts of you
would meet the nuts and bolts of me,
and through sun and rain we would fuse together,
belly to belly, nose to nose.
Instead, I meet devotion now
the way I once met Georgia O’Keefe’s clouds
in the stairwell of the Chicago Art Museum.
I stared at the giant painting, thinking to myself,
That’s not at all what it’s like.
Years later when I visited Abiquiu,
I saw the sky so true to what she’d painted,
gasped to see that herd of perfect ovals
flocked white above the red land.
Perhaps this is what devotion is like—
being willing to trust I know nothing at all
of what it looks like. That the only way it reveals itself
is when I meet it with wonder, the way I might meet
the work of a master, willing to be curious,
willing to be awed.