My Rebeccas

In my youth there was Rebecca standing on a hill of snow.

Other boys fought for attention but her smile was just for me.

The frozen city was our playground.

Our exploits were the stuff of legend,

Until our friendship faded into time.

In my teens there was Rebecca reading poetry in class.

She was kind to me when others found it amusing to be cruel.

We would talk until the break of dawn

And exchange desires and secrets,

Until our romance faded into time.

Away at school there was Rebecca studying rare works of art.

Wild, intense, and passionate and interested in me.

Our days were filled with ecstasy.

At night we dreamt about the future,

Until our liaison faded into time.

In my middle years there was Rebecca working in a crowded office.

Her energy and beauty sliced through monotony with ease.

We were partners, friends, and lovers

Fusing intimacy and insight,

Until our marriage faded into time.

In the end there was Rebecca living with me in a home.

All her trials and tribulations made her as strong as she was wise.

We laughed and cried through all our stories

And cherished moments spent together,

Until we both faded into time.

© Ben Siegan, 2019

RED LIPS CHANT! (ÉMILIE CHARMY PERFORMANCE, INCANTATION)

Look, good swaying people, good people with good vision, good eyes that see and see and see! Look at us! Visualize the vision we bring to you from upstairs! There is a long lady upstairs. Standing sideways but gazing at you…black hair, black eyebrows, red lips, red dress.  Imagine her into existence before you, paint like flowing flesh and flesh like flowing paint. Imagine a glowing flowing long red dress like a tall waterfall! See us! See Émilie Charmy!  Bring her paint before you, as we sing and dance her into existence before you. This is incantation. This is the charm of Émilie Charmy! Charmed by Charmy! Bring her before you! Visualize, touch the vision, feel  the force of the long red dress like a tall waterfall. Stroke your imagination. Émilie Charmy is here among you. Free! Frank! Forceful! Questioning! Parisian! Brave, free, frank, female…strong in paint, strong In flesh, strong in frankness, forthright before you,  paint flowing like a waterfall,  flesh flowing like paint,  a long red dress as tall as a waterfall. Visualize her freedom, her frankness, her force, her questioning black eyes, her appraising black eyebrows, the black heaven of her black hair, her freedom.  Brave, free, frank, female. Visualize her intelligent desire.  She is appraising you. She questions you. You question her. You judge her joy. She judges your joy. Joy judges joy. Freedom judges freedom. Paint forever fresh! Vigorous before you. The vigor of questions, the vigor of your glances. You and she exchange freedom.  A dance of questioning. Feel the dance of questioning. Look. Feel what you see. Feel her questions looking at you. You look. You feel the red tall waterfall of the long fresh dress. The freshness of the long red dress. The freshness of the questioning eyes. Her force, her joy, her intelligent desires! Feel the flow of her ferocious sexy goodness.  Sexy intelligence.  As fresh as flesh.  As fresh as paint. As fresh as the long red dress like a tall waterfall. Follow the flow!

You and she and we exchange dances, glances, charged and charmed by the strong smart woman upstairs, now before you here in vigorous vision. Wave your red dresses, the red dresses of your imagination. Shake out your red scarves like the flags of intelligent desire. Shake out your red scarves. You and she and we are incantation, together shaping  enchantment, the charm of Émilie Charmy. Chant and vision must be shaped by intelligent desire, by the shaping dance of joy judging joy, painted eyes and flesh eyes together making enchantment. We charm Émilie Charmy into existence before us. Slightly laughing she teaches us her spells and helps us to exist. Incantation! We chant our vision into existence, we charm our souls into vigor, into flow we can feel, flowing with the frank freshness of Émilie Charmy. This is a healthy trance, a democratic trance, unforced, strongly amiable. Our magic spell is taught us by a rare Parisian, a woman breaking into the heaven of art, the heaven of flesh and soul. Woman painter teaches us her bravery, her intelligent desire. Even her still lifes explode into wild rainbow health! Her parlors where women seemingly do middleclass things are changing before our eyes into strange rooms where strange love resides. O enigmatic atmosphere of her parlors where form transforms itself and transforms you. What are you watching….a parlor or a happy bordello!  Victorian décor or paint shaping desire revealed. This is a salubrious trick. What we thought was middleclass is really intense in its calm.

Desire revealed! Not really just another parlor. A room for desire! Unafraid! There is no fear in Émilie Charmy! She unchained herself by her charm. Free, frank, brave woman… Parisian joyousness, smart, strong, amused. She is amused to reveal, to show, to judge and shape her intelligent desire.  She forms us, we form her, in mutual erotic intelligence. We all now exist, paint and flesh and strong smart woman…Parisian in the era where ANYTHING AT ALL could be conceived and brought into palpably amazing being. Sway your red dresses! Wave your red scarves! Dance your healthy trance! Let us exchange trances! Red lips chant!

 And all this goodness occurs approved of by the shining steel cloud of the wavy Jean Arp sculpture curvaceous nearby. Jean Arp approves and shines his approval upon us. We are observed by that steel cloud of a wavy sculpture holding a wavy hole through which we see reality.  Art as curvy as nature! The steel cloud bounces blessing upon us like sunlight! Raise up your red lips, red scarves!

Émilie Charmy, “Portrait,” oil on canvas, 1921. Courtesy of Pamela K. and William A. Royall, Jr. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Travis Fullerton

ARTIST-MOTHER; JUNKYARD-FATHER: BOTH HEROES

My mother’s colors swarmed over the canvas in her basement studio while I watched intoxicated by the smell of turpentine and oil paint.  I swarmed and am still swarming in those slathered lavish hues; some, though, were the night behind the lightning.  When her huge cat Sansloy, scared by a dog as she cuddled him, bit her deeply in the arm, she took no revenge and her bed remained his comfort.  It shames me to say that I did not justly value her soiled white collar husband, my father.  Dazed and lonely in a family of artists, he decided to paint half of what we owned in gold color, to honor his wife, making a golden small domain.  Our concrete steps became gold; our bronze gods holding a clock became gold; chairs and tables often turned gold.  But after he died I realized he saved his children and wife from homelessness.  His finicky investments fed us.  I am ashamed.  He was a better man than I after all and merited his wife more than I.

And his junkyard!  His brief treasured part ownership! S crap!  Yet what the heart discarded or forgot confirmed me as an artist. I owe him that as well as shelter.  As if Stella and Rauschenberg and the Merzbau and Frank O’Hara had baptized me!

At the age of five I climbed over my father’s junkyard fence constructed like entangled steel claws.  In temporarily fearless fierce reverie, I voyaged through what seemed like all the haughty toys we could not afford, mountain ranges of squashed rainbow plastic or tin giddy gizmos that now bored wised-up wealthy children.  I wallowed in mazes, fondled ousted wheels, weapons, torsos, wings, their still exciting insulted spectrums. Encouraged, I hopped into actual condemned automobiles and thrust myself in this one instance through the space-time continuum far outdistancing in those saurian motorless cars the starship Enterprise.  In increasingly scratchy fact, the mutant and quarantined metal around me was for me an alluringly hulking perhaps unidentified dinosaur.  I began to get cut.  I tried to ask help from a nice alien, a “gilt” birdbath.  I levitated, swaying in the lap of armless cast iron garden statues.  I began to get dented.  I skimmed through gravel and into the air on bicycle frames.  I saw sprawling art books.  I tumbled face down into a volume of Aubrey Beardsley.  Unfairly sudden, a jungle of pipes like a pile of anacondas unjokingly and unjustifiably surrounded me.  My daze was dear to me but dangerous.  I strayed bleeding and weeping for an unfunny mile until I came upon a highway like Lake Victoria.  A cop got me.  The sun remained amiably lavish overhead, slathering me with easy gold.

My father had almost lost me.  But I found sharp art and his junk endowed me with the bedazzled and dazzling wound of poetry. In that junkyard was everything that evaded nothingness for awhile, cowering or lowering or posing bravely.  I found the tangle that reveals hard dream and plush but worn reality.  I measured trashed treasure. Merciful mother!  She pardoned the cat!  She pardoned my fine father, finally.  I still inhale her oils.  But has art pardoned me?  Are you justly valued?

© Stephen Margulies, 2014

Junkyard cat
Photo by Downtown gal
from Wikimedia Commons

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