Ekphrases

Practicing an etymologically literal out + telling with a friend's paintings as form-thoughts on poetry draw to a close like a circular doorway

I have a dear friend—let’s call him Tomás. Let’s call him Fyodor, or let’s call him Cowboy Dan. Let’s call him He Who Constantly Fills My Shoes with Little Pebbles. I am grateful for the little lessons their little pains bring me.

This friend happens to be a painter and a person bewilderingly fluent in the languages of visual form. I say “bewilderingly fluent” because I am not a native speaker of this language, and I have no clue how one wades into these waters. I can hear it if I turn down the volume on my inveterate make more sounds; sounds are good. He and I often fall into these sprawling rambles on aesthetics and on education, on experience and epistemology and meaning and and and and. We make rich and sumptuous helpings of stone soup served in hot bowls that keep your hands warm.

I have wanted to collaborate with him for a few years now on a painting–poetry side project, just a little ditty, but—if I can be ungenerous here for a second—he’s a bit coy and a lone-wolfish about doing capital-A Art in collaboration, and a project we can agree on has yet to materialize out of the mists of my suggestions for co-creativity.

(An aside: what’s the deal with Gen X blokes being titchy-cagey about playing with others? I don’t mean to play the Battle of Generations game, but I’m noticing a pattern, and my filthy, co-dependent Millennial need for collaboration and perpendicular play just can’t abide.)

Despite this creative fête falling flat, despite it being in a somewhat cryogenic stasis while waiting in the wings of subjunctive possibility, I have gone ahead and have tried to form lines based on the forms (and color—oh, goodness, the color) I could read in his paintings. I have used ekphrastic approaches in the classroom to help make poetry less intimidating or less abstract or less not-happening, but I’ve never really gone down this rabbit hole with my own writing. Given the thoughts on form and poetry I have been chewing of late, this seemed like an opportune tangent (and a way to transmute my wHy WoN’t YoU pLaY wItH mE? into something a bit more productive).

---

Ekphrasis #1: Recession in Blue

Two figures flawed in their thought 
Menageries spot shorelines afar,
Find that even water won't wait up.

It's as though some seismic sponge
Came and wiped it all up,
All the stuck stuff they'd mucked.

The figures keep walking; they'll soon stop
At the silent place where bright days 
become blue nights & nothing ever hurts.

Keep your fixed gaze gloaming
On that foreshore haze where
The horizon bends a bit;

There are places you can’t see yet.

---

Ekphrasis #2: (Softly Open Our Mouths in the Cold)

I seep and spread wide
Alluvial-like the liquid
Holding you here, hoping.
My arms bend to ridges & rims:
My landscape's headlock
Your neck, at first, chafes against
But then accepts, a gritty grind.

My bone's marrow burns
Spaces in you like the
Holes in a chainsmoker's
Denim, just singes and ashes.

As you slip, stumble, and wander
From hillock hallucinations
To coolest pools, you are subsumed,
Every inch of your skin
Wrapped within my story.
Just shut up:
You’re welcome.