The Literary Art

Diane Garden, our poet for this week, teaches creative writing to gifted students at Daphne High School and lives in Mobile. Her poems have appeared in Jewish Spectator, Presence Africaine, MidAmerica and other magazines. Negative Capability published her chapbook, The Hannah and Papa Poems. In 1988, she won the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award for the best poem in the Midwest Poetry Festival.

Measures to Movements

-After Degas’ Portrait of Estelle Musson

She has tucked herself into a corner

behind the table where she’s arranging

flowers that she can barely see-

pale dabs and blurred bells in a vase,

a cloud of sea green and tan like the Gulf

when sand drifts up from the bottom.

The whirled brown background wraps

around her, a shawl that drapes her plain

black dress that shrouds the swell of her belly.

She’s mourning over the loss of most

of her vision B flowers whose bright tints

rose, white and vermillion have faded.

Yet, we can see her preparing to live

with total blindness among shadows.

She’s learning to draw the world closer

as her fingers bathed in white light grace

the flowers, like ivory keys on her piano.

Soon, she’ll lift her hand and move back

into brown sadness. Still, with time

she’ll stay happy for longer intervals,

from playing measures to movements.

She’ll step out and fill her basket

with the smells of praline and chicory

as she winds through the French market

with her maid. At home she’ll trace her way

to the window that she’ll open. The green

brushed flat against the pane and sunlight

on the cross bar will spill over and bathe

her child in her lap as she feeds her

crumbs of croissant dipped in cocoa.

Stone and Paper Birds

I love this music

that’s metallic and light

which comes as a surprise

that’s hidden from me

until I finally find it

in a neighbor’s tree,

or I remember my front porch,

my stone birds on string.

How odd they make

music from bumping B

head to breast

wing to beak

and are silent like fish.

Once they hit too hard

and left half

a bird on string.

My stone birds remind me

of the paper ones

Maia folded

for my daughter’s birth,

cranes of silver,

that floated in swirls

above her crib.

Soon we’ll need

to read to her

the story of Sadako

who tried to fold

a thousand cranes,

so the gods would cure

her illness caused

by the War.

She’ll learn Sadako’s

friends finished for her,

that people come to pray

at her statue where

they place paper cranes.

Jeff Goodman is Lagniappe literary editor. Contact him at literaryed@lagniappemobile.com.

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