Two Poems

48 WLT NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2015 courtesy of the national museum of women in the arts , washington , d . c . gift of wallace and wilhelmina holladay ; photograph by lee stalsworth cover feature art poetry Two Poems by Lauren Camp Alma’s Stripes for Alma Thomas Some days light is the color of all my losses. As the hours roll back in reflected pigments, I paint to perceive impossible beauty, a pattern that yearns for more of itself: the startle of sun against holly and jonquils, their clusters and bells held high on linear leaves. From the window, daylight untangles above bulbs and buttercups, the bristling city, into color I see as a sequence of stripes strutting through paradise – the light urgent and moist on hues and mornings. My eye is alone in frizzled myrtle and wedges of dogwood, alone in cherry blossoms flushed and fanning. Reflections brush and realign as they recline on canvas: poplar leaves in breeze, the ragged camaraderie of gray and grated green. I do not envy the tree nor the flower. I only want more time without language. My hands make azaleas, piling up pink in equations. Birds enter the moonlight. My window leans out on all sides of my world. One day to the next week, the sky moves behind what is already mine. How to define petal to petal, uniformed in gold? Iterations of shapes in a row. Sometimes I reach reverence. Sometimes light climbs softly through, staining the room. Alma Woodsey Thomas, Iris, Tulips, Jonquils, and Crocuses (1969), acrylic on canvas, 60 x 50 in. In the collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 49© 2015 the murray holman family trust / artists rights society ( ARS ), new york digital image© the museum of modern art / licensed by scala / art resource , ny The Möbius of Elizabeth Murray She ran through paint until the sky was stained green She lived in brushes and pluses and doorways in crusts of oil and slop She drank laughter in coffee cups with cream She answered yes! To make her subtract what she’d already drawn she did everything before the color of day wore out or right after All night she kept shoving belief into strange zigging shapes: into Es and new realms of edges creamy-lipped cadmium barium red and the upturned cup and the shoes The paintings are never complete but a place to start again with yellow globs and angst and ears stuck in a triangle by a guitar or a watermelon slice And other disobediences that make me slow down polish each feeling and push back my hair into roads Oh! the mutter and flutter of being squeezed sideways Oh! the detail Sometimes she kept clues in the cages she drew She cantilevered her canvas with eyeballs I heard the blink and kept looking She reordered floating nests of the mind (continued on page 50) Elizabeth Murray, Do the Dance (2005), oil on canvas on wood, 9’5”x 11’3”x 11⁄2”. In the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 50 WLT NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2015 an unbroken view of blue squishes She jammed the generous shape of existence to the triangular direction of jokes Wasn’t she funny The first thing she said when she sat down to work was simultaneous for hypnotic effect Oh! the fat sweat of trumpet and oh! the color of gray on the slurred edge of city behind ladders and circles She couldn’t figure out the gnawing headaches but the grime and dream in a round glass stayed almost empty still lipped with sweet in her splotch and pop world and when it stormed in the east thunder jiggered and blatt with treble and torrent tight to the ground Such a calling And oh! there was consequence to temperament when sticks cascaded to train tracks and bubble clouds outlined without thought where only the outside remained Unlike popsicles where you suck up the sugar to the back of your throat and what’s left is the ice without moisture Oh death! It’s an excuse isn’t it It’s her secrets we want How she joined up

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