Karen Rigby
Chrysanthemums
Against Chagall’s blue dark chrysanthemums extravagant
as Chinese New Year’s lions: heads flecked with rust, petals
pushing the frame. I love their shaggy
forcefulness, bronze-green leaves a hammered sculpture.
Against illumined order, movement
and repose, an angel in flight
is neither warrior
nor vision, so curved by the artist’s brush
that he’s harmless.
One winter on O’Hara street
I read in a yellow brick hospital
absorbing nothing.
About the mind’s corridors,
its inward
silence,
I lived
without flowers
or consequence.
The cut of a streetside bloom obliterates
nothing. I meant alleviates. In that borough of snowfall
red moons under my nails.
Why My Poems Refuse Daylight
Pinpricks on water,
celluloid glare too paradisical on the retina. It’s not
natural for my poems to roll up
on a butter-gold vista
& idle without a single cumulus. There’s got to be a violin:
tension like a knife-thrower
weighing its target the split-
second before it hits
clear above the eyes. What’s there to contemplate
if everything’s explainable? I like it when a vision’s so weird
it grows fur. If you want immaculate
syntax, it won’t happen, but I can serve
glamour with the best of them. No gimcrack.
My poems hunt shadow in the folds: Madame X
dusted in lavender powder. Persimmons stacked
in a blue bowl. Everything in art
is gesture. I can’t save you
from whatever’s next, but if you listen
for the sound a house makes when the locks fall
this is for you, with your stung heart.
--
Karen Rigby is the author of Chinoiserie (Ahsahta Press). Her poems have been published in Australian Book Review, The London Magazine, Bennington Review, The Spectacle, Grain, and other journals. A 2007 National Endowment for the Arts fellow in poetry, she lives in Arizona.