Monday, May 21, 2012

Picnic Table


The neighbors who were moving brought it over,
a picnic table, almost new,
and asked if we wanted it for the back yard.
“You’re the ones with children- 
and everything,” they added 
with a look of longing, 
some relief. 
It has sat in the same place all these years,
rough from the wear of seasons, 
its cedar planks once braced flat and perfect,
now like buck teeth.
My children are grown now 
but the table remains, top of the slope 
in the back yard.  
It is a place for me to sit in silence, 
away from the loneliness 
of an unwritten poem.
From here I have watched ground hogs
climb the creek bank, cross the yard,
one trailing the other.  
They never saw me as they nudged
June apples 
littering the ground green.   
I have watched leaves wander in fall wind,
brown and scampering through the garden 
like new puppies.
And this winter I noticed how cold rain had dropped 
into stalactites suspended from bare branches 
in the cherry tree nearby.
It’s funny.  Such a random gift and its impact.  
We never heard from those neighbors again. 
They probably don’t remember us
or the table they gave away.
But it is here that I come to consider 
all manners of things.
Yesterday it was how the Peace Lily had bloomed 
on the day he died
and how I had found such comfort
in this small thing.
Today I find myself out here again.
A trio of robins has lined up and shaken 
late snow off the red bud
onto my solitary post.  
I know now it won’t last long enough,
either the last breath of winter
or this first gasp of spring.
© Susan Muse, 2012

Groundhog: photo from Wikimedia Commons

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

How to Draw an Elephant: A Chestertonian Inspiration


Your muse has sung in siren tongue 
A beguiling incantation.
Your inspired mind no shackle can bind, 
No qualm deter its vocation.
Artistry pent, pause you resent;
All scruple you christen defeat. 
Your aim, I see: originality
Suffers no orthodox conceit.
Promptly then, your opus begin, 
Unleash that rapacious vision. 
With each stroke defy, make each shape deny 
The tyranny of convention.
Prepare your page, your pen engage,
Your subject (let me now confirm)
Is that splendid beast, that atheistic feast, 
The tusked and truckèd pachyderm.
Stylus grip, press its inky tip
To field of pale obscurity.  
Why stand dismayed? Dare you invade
Its utopian purity?
No pretense is artistic sense
That reveres an unsullied space.
But reluctance to its neutrality hew
Conflates passivity with grace.
Yield not to fear, sketch first an ear
With a broad, elephantine curve.
Now neatly impose a prehensile nose
By a dexterous manual swerve.
How you protest! Do I suggest
So insipid a rendering?
Can I advise such a trite exercise
In artistic surrendering?
Drolly antique—hardly unique—
Is the hackneyed, serpentine snout.
I sense your distress, how can you express
Yourself by so public a route? 
Art must be bold (or so I’m told),
So cowering custom displace.
Why not a square, or else nothing but air
To hang from his singular face?  
Next his leg—your pardon I beg, 
You find its girth too confining?
Then cinch it a bit, or freely submit 
To less inspired designing.
Onward we tack to his broad back;
His bulk let us immortalise.
Never! Cry you, every feeling eschews
The banality of an elephant’s size.
Your pen strays near his unshaped rear
Tracing a concise, playful trail.
How dogmatic, how undemocratic— 
But how sublimely like a tail.
Why do you cringe? Does it impinge
On your avant-garde proclivity
That a form so concrete should now complete
Your surge of creativity?
Bar then, rules of outmoded schools
From your audacious abstraction.
But if I may be plain, while they restrain,
They merit no blithe rejection. 
Though indeed, your subject you’ve freed
From the rigid form that bound him,
In that cage he was free simply to be
An elephant, as you found him.
Corporally shrunk, loosed of his truck.
Can you him an elephant name?
The freedom you prize in willingness lies 
To be restricted by a frame.
Pure license no insight attends, 
But like that fool’s tale does it ring
With the full fury of blind anarchy:
A scene that signifies nothing.
Heed then, friend, lest your daring rend
Image from imagination.
Rejoice that each line from all else defines; 
For true art is limitation.
© Elise Matich, 2012

Grey Elephant; drawing by Luigi Bairo, from Wikimedia Commons