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.