Landscaping
Let us shape the land so we can look out at it. Or we can lift our hands from it and still shape
it with our gaze, as a pianist lifts her palms from the keys to better track melody on the page.
Let us smear Vaseline on our eyes, hold up our extended thumbs and index fingers to make
a frame. We can prune the dead grass from our vision, censor it. The entire forest could be
one topiary if you get far enough from it, one head of broccoli. Our eyeballs make walls
around whatever we stare at. Because we cannot see everything at once, we feel desire.
This is superb, particularly the first two lines. I wrote a poem once - long ago -- about being an artist in seeing. This is much what I had in mind, but I didn't express it nearly as well as this. It was light years away!
ReplyDeleteOh god. I know people who do their whole lives like this! The broccoli forest is priceless.
ReplyDeleteLove broccoli
ReplyDeleteLove Broccoli
ReplyDeleteWonderful poem, Hannah!
ReplyDeleteOh boy, I love this one.
ReplyDeleteThinking of the art of framing...and of that last line!
ReplyDeletewe separate ourselves from nature in order to frame it, to represent it in art. this may be inevitable (that's just the kind of beings we are -- and our notion of simplicity or realism is usually just a "style"), but i wonder if it the art is truly worth the separation ... it reminds me of 17th century travelers confronted with landscape and reaching for their claude glass, turning their backs on the landscape itself, unable to appreciate it without framing it as "landscape" ...
ReplyDeletethe last sentence is the basis for a philosophy, isn't it? a philosophy and a religion....
I make walls with everything.
ReplyDelete