| MARY KAISER |
| Falling into Velázquez | |
| 2006 |
| "Painting
and poetry have been twinned since antiquity, but seldom so eloquently as in Mary
Kaiser's collection, Falling into Velázquez. Poem after poem pulls us into
a work of art-some famous, some not-and then out into our own lives again….Mary
Kaiser's luminous first collection delights from beginning to end." —Peter Meinke |
Eakins
Makes a Hot Day
Mount
Vernon Street, Philadelphia, 1872
Eye
dead center, he lashes his perspective to the vanishing point,
rules, sketches
looming verticals and a thin keel wedge, outlines
the intake of an hour: like
a hot day he once saw or is seeing.
Oblique
angles of an unmanned skiff cross foolscap lines. Paired oars
like finger
bones skim the grid. Box end and oarlock float skyward.
Pencilled cones suggest
a sturdy lower body–is this a spectral man?
Fresh
sheet, new lines. With a wash of cheap tint, he skates the shell
across paper
planks. Inside the spokes, blank torsos man the oars.
The graphite pier, weightless
as a cinder, drifts into the shallow hull.
Eakins
counts his grid to see where the sun hits water and how far
beams stretch
in summer. Once fixed, the rowers’ skulls shift the apex.
Reflection
notes ride the sky: trees on near side, off side of a man.
The artist
combines never creates, and then the craft comes round.
Taut
canvas gessoed, palette loaded, linseed and sweat reek of Paris
where rivals
stripped to wrestle on the grit-strewn floor, and where
he learned to use
the brush, more powerful than point or stump.
Light
sifts through layers of ochre to the chalky impasto of an August sky.
Champion
rowers John and Barney Biglin ease their racer’s slim length
round granite
pilings weathered and mossed as the walls of Babylon.
The
sun’s yellow blade chisels elbows, knees, cheekbones. An oar’s tip
foams;
crimson outriggers inject raw pigment into classical sludge.
Leaning
back for the next long stroke, the dapper Biglins squint westward,
beyond
the sunset and the slantwise prospect of their pair-oared shell,
launching
out of somber gradation into a foreground of untried blue.
2006 Slapering Hol Press
Chapbook Contest winner,
Mary Kaiser, will read on Monday, March 31, 2008 at the
Cornelia Street
Cafe with 2007 winner Stephanie Lenox
and 2005 winner Sean Nevin.