Jody's Notes
(October 26, 2012)
Surely this is a poetry genre: look at a painting (real or made up) and write a poem about it. Even I've done this a couple of times.
The genre is precious--and the results are often equally precious. (Something is precious if it's hard to read, if it makes your skin itch not because it's creepy but because you want to jump up and run around the block three or four times, waving your arms around in big gestures.)
This poem doesn't fail that way. (Sometimes, a poem is an attempt not to fail the way that other poems that resemble it fail. Modesty is called for, of course: there are ever so many ways to fail.)
I republished this poem in The Lust for Blueprints.
It persists, surprisingly:
a boneless statue, its meat
yielding only to time.
A theological sky:
eyes scattered like birds.
Near the murdered clock
a virus, its treasured codex,
blueprint for immortality,
sleeps in a bottle.
The faint-veined ruby
its throb barely detectable
hangs in the air like a heart.
Outside the cloud of paint
something is ticking.
Pray it doesn’t wake up.
© 1999, 2001 Jody Azzouni