Susan Kelly-DeWitt Page 3
Shadowbox Cross
Bones, a knife handle (tarnished scrolls), old buttons, baby doll hands and feet stuck out of a gold valentine candy box top. “Gold adds validity to what is essentially garbage,” says the artist, who also loves gilded Siennese shrines. She’s spray- painted dry abutilon pods from her garden—Chinese lanterns, they’re called— stuffed their skeletal vegetal lace into an ear trumpet’s smudged horn of plenty. I imagine her lifting and stretching to gather the plump pods in mid-summer—scarlet, vermilion—then sorting through hue, to find the right mixtures of color to capture their true paint. All one summer and winter they pose for her, like papery Cezanne apples in a blue glass bowl then, dissolving in air, the bright skins slough to dull dust. Come spring she collects what’s left of them up for this piece called “Repositorio;” she spray-paints them liberally (gold again) so they stiffen like filigree cages for tiny white doves (as if a Holy Ghost in miniature might actually descend, enter.) No Christ, no bloody hands, bloody feet, but dismemberment of the god into the everyday throwaway, the castoff humdrum recycled particles of parts. No Osiris or strewn Orphic flesh. No blood-spattered lyre or crown of thorns but a heart of hammered tin, sprouting wings like rooster combs where thorns would be. A heart that cries: Cock-a-doodle-doo!
for Maggie Jimenez
Egrets Along
the Yolo Causeway
Every day I watch how they float
into the wind; how they stretch
their legs out behind them
like burnt matchsticks,
then fall, heavy as drugged
eyelids into muddy browns, crushed
iris blues; how they plunge
suddenly as danger
or
stupor into the shadows
of
a ditch. Often, climbing up
out of a shadowed place myself—
out of a muggy airless wetland
where thoughts grow dark
seeds like wild rice—I spot one,
a
loner, drifting below the causeway,
wading the weedy edges of slough
grass, his yellow beak gleaming
like a cutlass. Focused
on
the task at hand: Beauty
is
not even a vague
idea to him, or truth. He’ll stab
whatever helps him
live. Every day as I travel past them
from the prison where I teach
men to uncage hope, snap
open the hinges, I watch how they lift
from the rich delta plowlands,
how they glide free—a wholeness—
like one white feather, unlocked from its body,
shiftless and holy.
(from The Fortunate Islands, Marick Press, 2008)
© Copyright, 2013,
Susan Kelly-DeWitt. |