Poetry Magazine, Eloise Klein Healy, June-July 2000

Eloise Klein Healy

USA

MUSE MUSE MUSE

1 Georgia O"Keeffe in
"Georgia Young, Georgia Old"

Because her lips
look as if what she says
will allow you,

and her eyes say
you can fall into,
drift up from,
and into her again,

because her body says,
she couldn't be just anyone--

those famous hands holding the robe
(closed?)(open?)
take your eyes off her eyes,

and she allows you
without giving in.

2. Tina Modotti in "Muse Muse"

Eleven faces
and one odalisque,
the pose sylph-like
and self-absorbed,
certainly not looking to beguile--
turning her focus
on herself,
a breathing lens,
one finger
about to click the shutter
of her third eye

3 Muse Muse Muse

So when the woman artist draws portraits
of other women artists,
arranging them again in poses
invented by their male lovers,

the woman poet asks
what power is duplicated then
in image after image?

The woman poet asks
if the artist
has never been with a woman,

how does she frame
what to look at
but by borrowing desire?

And what if desire duplicated
duplicates desire, determines itself
no matter how it's seen or by whom?

What if the shadow in this case
throws the figure
and not the other way around?

published in "MUSE MUSE MUSE," ARTLIFE,
Vol. 19, #9 (1999). This magazine
is printed in limited editions of
100 copies because all copies are
handmade.

POSTCARD

                                        for Lynda Hull

                       "Today every-
                        thing was glazed with ice
                        after a brief thaw then a plunge
                        in temp. So the news was
                        full of spectacular 25 and
                        40 car
                        smash-ups.
                        Weather and traffic as meta-
                        phor? I won't touch
                        that one!"

1

Found this message on a postcard from you
by accident about a month or so
after your death.

What did it matter then I'd stuck the card
as placemarker in a collection of stories?
What did it matter then if you were in Amsterdam
or New Jersey or Chicago?

Always in motion,
Back and forth, faster and faster.
that was the danger - so much so soon.

One friend seeing your picture in the paper
mistook your obituary for an announcement
you'd won another poetry prize.

2

That line to me about weather and traffic
was just a joke - who supposedly knows less
about weather than a Southern Californian?
And who knows more about traffic
than a Los Angeles poet, anyway?

And who knew more about death
than you who turned away
from that follow spot more than once,
the chanteuse who stopped shooting her blood
full of jazzy soporific juice?

Who knew more about flirting with death,
kiss-on-the-cheek flirting,
and smoky dancing thigh against thigh with it
down the chasm of love?

3

Everybody knew it would come, it would come
to end you earlier than most,
no old woman sitting in a room, dreary
on a white-sheeted bed.

It would come in high relief, it would come
like numbness in a needle, cold as overdose
even when you said you weren't using anymore.
It would come because it always comes‹-

just like Chet Baker falling out that window,
just like falling in love with how blood is dark and tasty.

It would come because you were
a hand-leaving glove kind of gal,
risky as rhinestones before 5:00 PM.

4

Skinny saint, I would have put some meat on your bones
if you had slept with me.
But you were my guardian angel
and not anywhere near available for lust,
not anywhere near available for me
since I didn't need saving,
just revising.

My belated epitaph comes down to
this shambles of intention.
I have a postcard from you that set elegy in motion,
and it keeps tumbling like a mantra of remembrance
or a cajoling spell for more words,
more poems as deep and lush as trumpet bells,
poems to love for their sheen and tactile intelligence,
chiaroscuro in language your meter.

5

Come to your senses, I say. She is dead,
and I place that foreign feeling squarely in front of me
like a postcard of a room in which the chair of an artist
painted by another artist sits empty.

Published in Cedar Press Review (January, 2000)