To Keep Love Fresh

Genevieve Bjargardottir

A Darkness So Large
Caroline Gormley

At night the west is still gloaming with a darkness so large the porch turns red. Its voice I am finding unchanged: the same shirts folded. Creaks shift one room over. How that morning still exists,  is a place we can visit. I see it: A calendar, the calendar hung by Caroline's hands.To keep love fresh, share a plum. This rough magic thread-count lost. What's a girl got to do for some luminous body. The subject shifts from one room over. Ah there, there. A hand-covered mouth I here abjure.

Veiled Views

Monument Valley, Utah, USA 1997 André Thijssen

Weathering

Jessica Elsaesser, from her series Oddments

How a passing

Leaves you

Bleached by it,

A white tree

Among the others

As though this

Were not the

Taking of something

From you,

But a mark,

One that spreads

Abating what you were

Before replacing you,

Your memories like

Petrified wood that

Has been stone

So very long.

Speaking of Horses

Morning Snow, by Joseph Gerhard

Downhearted

Ada Limón, October 2011

Six horses died in a tractor-trailer fire.
There. That’s the hard part. I wanted
to tell you straight away so we could
grieve together. So many sad things,
that’s just one on a long recent list
that loops and elongates in the chest,
in the diaphragm, in the alveoli. What
is it they say, heart-sick or downhearted?
I picture a heart lying down on the floor
of the torso, pulling up the blankets
over its head, thinking this pain will
go on forever (even though it won’t).
The heart is watching Lifetime movies
and wishing, and missing all the good
parts of her that she has forgotten.
The heart is so tired of beating
herself up, she wants to stop it still,
but also she wants the blood to return,
wants to bring in the thrill and wind of the ride,
the fast pull of life driving underneath her.
What the heart wants? The heart wants
her horses back.

You can hear the artist read the poem here.

Found Poem, Found Photograph

A simple photo with a simple question; a simple poem. Carolyn, can I rest yet? Found via the artist Mary Walling Blackburn's Year 2011 email update.

Currencies

Found Photograph

Untitled, by Caroline Gormley

Two people are riding in a car. The passenger is holding a picture.

Driver: What's that you got there?
Passenger: Where?
D: What's that you're looking at?
P: A picture.
 D: Yeah a picture of what?
P: Oh, not sure exactly…home I guess. A home I've never been to.
D: Can I take a look?

 The passenger hands the driver the photograph. There's a small
structure off center. The driver shifts his eyes between the picture
and the road.

D: This doesn't look like a home. Not to me.
P: Well, it's what I've got. See how it's not centered? Kinda out of
focus? It's like whoever took the picture didn't have time. Or didn't
know the ways it would matter. Just snapped it while they could.

The driver hands the photograph back to the passenger.

D: Looks like a lousy lot to me.
P: I found it in my parents house. After they died. You know, I rent
it out to travelers now. I was going through the dresser drawers
trying to find anything that was left after my sister took most
everything to Houston. Found some pliers that were rusted shut and
this. The date on the back is the year I was born. I don't know
anything about it. Couldn't find any other pictures like it.

The two drive in silence for a while. The sun is setting ahead. The
passenger takes his billfold out and places the photograph back
inside.

P: Isn't that funny though? The way the subject shifts over time?