Dane Hamann
Moonlight by Edvard Munch
The outbursts of your mind are
considered automatic & stylized
open spaces. Your hand just glides,
seeing the way night takes a lungful.
Consider this sky & shoreline,
a thin white channel of bone
dripping like wax. A cloistered
midsummer awash in a cold palette.
Maybe it’s all cloud to you, or sunset
triggered by a pushbutton moon.
It’s form unanchored. A confrontation
coming into view from the forest’s edge.
You try to plump up the scene. Boughs,
impossibly swollen, starving toothpick trees.
Your best choice was an island. A shadow
of bedrock brushed with weightless gray.
You find the fullness of such a night
too easy, so you daub it out of habit
while I choke on the heat of pre-dinner
drinks, my heart caroming inside
a perfectly sized shot glass. Pour me one
more, painter, anchor me to this shore.
Q & A a cento based on the poems in Dean Rader’s book Works & Days
|
Question: what gets to be
What does it mean Is the opposite of darkness, Who’s to say What does it mean Can time’s exhaust What happens now? |
beautiful? to see light? darkness? the stars understand their heavy labor? to know time? be our only companion? |
The light crashing down your spine. This is the light that is absent of shadow. The star’s lids never close. Our voices. The land was land before we were us. Even The End has to end sometime |
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Dane Hamann is a copy editor at a textbook publisher in Chicago’s southwest suburbs. Dane is also a graduate student at Northwestern University where he studies in the MFA in Creative Writing program and works for TriQuartely Online.