It’s been a challenging, inspiring, and surprisingly productive spring. I’ve been up in the studio writing and painting in spare moments. The paintings are experiments in layering liquid paint over swatches of color swept across the canvas intuitively and spontaneously. Asheville Dreaming remembers and reimagines the energy of Asheville, NC and the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Asheville Dreaming
The mythic figure in Chimera seemed to appear as I painted silver paint on the second layer. In Greek mythology the Chimera was a fire-breathing female monster, part lion, part goat, part serpent. The word has also come to mean an illusion. The Chimera, its mythology and image as metaphor haunted my last collection of poems Every Glittering Chimera. Clearly she's still haunting me.
Chimera
One of my poems is featured in the new anthology Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice edited by Carol Alexander and Stephen Massimilla, alongside poems by Ross Gay, Jane Hirshfield, and Yusef Komunyakaaa. A new poem, “This Shall Never Pass,” appears in the new issue of Pendemics Journal, a publication of the Global Quarantine Museum, coming out at the end of May. The theme for the new issue was déjà vu. A theme that really resonated this spring. You can read my poem below, can read Pendemics Journal here, and can check out the Global Quarantine Museum and the artifacts it holds.
THIS SHALL NEVER PASS
Diego’s rescued pre-Columbian sculptures
saved and silent behind glass
in a pyramid he built.
We stand before preserved forms,
crafted before the birth of Christianity
and we are awed by time.
A pregnant woman, belly protruding, hands wrapped
around her girth, hooded eyes glancing down
at the child she carries.
A warrior in full regalia, hat piled with snakes.
Dancing figures, arms up, legs entwined
and several small clay Siamese twins.
We stare at the work of hands from centuries gone,
tied to us through pigments, a human thread
of earth dug and shaped by ancient artists
whose names were buried long ago.
Diego’s pyramid reminds us
time passes through us
then leaves us in obscurity.
We think about how nothing changes.
Birth and war and dance,
love, hate, the same as always.
A woman and the child she carries,
bombed and bleeding in Ukraine;
one legged boy on crutches
in this museum of antiquities;
a couple nuzzling in a corner.
All of us, a momentary cast of shadows
in the scheme of things.