Quartet in C

The Apple Hill Chamber quartet played Hayden's Quartet in C today, September 30, 2016, at the Harrisville (New Hampshire) General Store. A pleasantly informal venue for one of America's finest string quartets.

Woman with Wings

A woman confronts a photo

of another woman with wings.

The winged woman poses before

a tower crane that poses in turn

before a distant cityscape.

Although the burnished tangerine

gown that drapes her geometry

features elegant corrugations

that would surely trip her in flight,

her wings look too feathery

to brace all that fashion aloft.

The woman observing may think

these doubtful appendages fail

to justify so much wall space

in this worldly, pricey museum.

Without creeping closer and spoiling

the tableau, I can’t determine

if those wings have grown fresh

from the subject’s sexual ethos

or whether from early childhood

she enjoyed deep alar passions

that have fruited in this display.

Maybe she hasn’t actually flown

on those flimsy accessories

but will launch herself as soon

as the photographer has finished.

Maybe the woman onlooker

would like to have wings of her own

and will go home determined

to grow them despite the fear

this ambition stirs in her partner

and friends. I want to tell her

to go ahead and will her wings

to sprout from her naked back,

maybe after a strenuous bout

of routine lovemaking. Maybe,

though, she just wants to drape

herself in tangerine and pose

before a distant smiling city

where tower cranes peck at

the landscape like blue herons

pecking meat from minor species.

Making Modern

A cow skull painted fine-grained on canvas stares me down. Georgia O’Keeffe preferred the bones of cattle, skeletons of landscape, desert raw as the average nude. Her first kiss with Alfred Stieglitz must have chilled and grilled them both to the core. As I try to focus on paint rather than picture, museum visitors buff me with great expectations. “Making Modern,” an exhibit that deigns to impress, inhales but refutes or refuses my taste. Although I respect O’Keeffe’s grasp of her arid silence, I prefer the rougher strokes of Arthur Dove, the corrugations of Marsden Hartley, and the tough white factories of Charles Sheeler. Losing face to face, photography recedes from painting, yet retains a grip. Despite the triumph of the imagination, more skulls lurk in the desert to snap at the bare feet of pilgrims determined to meet their animal spirit guides.

A woman folds onto on the bench beside me. She scans a map of the museum and frowns in several shades of violet. She’s making herself modern. I think we’re both in a painting by Stuart Davis, one that will wrestle us to the floor in a tangle of competing forms and clashing hues. I wish O’Keeffe’s derisive skull could masticate Davis’s plastic forms and spit out neat squares of Rothko. Two shades of crimson glowing in a frame of burnt orange. Or electric blue and yellow framed in navy. I lean into my notebook to hide my face from the agony of the new. Stieglitz and O’Keeffe have filtered their sex lives through me, and I may not weather the toxic glow.