Elms

In memory, it is their greenness,
neighbor brushing up to neighbor,
a cloak of saw-toothed leaves
draped over yards, arching 
over streets, forming a tunnel.
When disease hit, my father fought back,
hiring a forester who fed drugs
through long plastic tubes.
Even as my father lay dying,
tubing to his veins,
elms drank from their buckets.
One by one, my mother had them felled.

In my own yard, one elm has lived
despite a limb lost in a storm.
Every spring the tree renews itself.
On one side, two honey locusts,
on the other, a pair of spruces.
I have discovered that in autumn,
elm leaves turn yellow as a torch,
shimmering, dancing, stars performing.
Its neighbors know nothing 
of maples and oaks, 
sumacs and burning bushes, 
letting the elm bring in autumn
until wind pulls away the leaves,
which fall to the ground, 
becoming the color of earth.

About the painting and poem
Sumacs seem beautiful to me, though often overlooked and overshadowed by maples with their bright cloaks and oaks with their brass and bronze. I remember this piece of art with fondness. I selected it because sumacs are mentioned in the poem, even though the poem is about elms. To make this piece I used an actual sumac leaf and glued it onto a painted and stamped piece of white muslin.  Sumacs interest me because they are more of a weedy bush than a tree, yet every fall they change colors and create roadside beauty.  They grow in ditches, on the edge of woods.  Nothing says autumn to me more than a sumac wearing its colorful leaves.

​The Last Dance

Corn cobs, 
kernels hard and dented,  
fall like downed pins 
at a bowling alley,
and hang from flaxen stalks.
The stalk’s dry leaves hum
like a mouth organ
whenever breezes blow.

When winds blow harder,
the whole plant dances,
stalks bending across 
the farmer’s orderly rows 
to reach and rub against neighbors. 

Now the field sounds like a rushing river.
From tassal tops to gnarly roots, 
corn stalks shake and rattle, 
all ears listening for the combine. 

About the painting and poem
The painting dates from 2006 and the poem some time in that era as well, from my farm days that gave me so much poetic fodder and inspiration.  Today is hot, humid and windy, not feeling like autumn but not feeling exactly like summer either, more like its last hot breath.  By Wednesday (today is Sunday) it will be cooler and autumn will be in the air.  I love the autumn season.  Like spring, it makes me feel energized and alive.  I always paint a lot in autumn.  I say , "Bring it on!"

Monopoly Building
 
Five giants in the front yard--
two honey locusts, two Norwegian Spruce, and an elm.
 
The elm, split one summer in a hard storm,
is able still to shade in summer, hold bird feeders,
flame up to gold in autumn, 
bend with north wind in winter,
show promise of season change.
 
The honey locusts, lacy leaves imprinting an intricate design
on the sky, are perfectly spaced
for the hammock.  To swing beneath them,
is like being in paradise, going back to a time,
when life could be slowed to enjoy
just being alive on a day when sky is blue 
and warmth in season.
When flowering, the hum of bees
is audible, then brown pods form,
hanging like ornaments on a holiday tree
put up too early, then forgotten.
 
The two spruce trees house bird nests
and singing perches for many different species
identifiable only by song.
In spring, cones rain down gently,
showing the maternal urge to give life
continues another year.
 
Whenever life gets out of balance,
material concerns, politics, human strife 
too great, I walk down the road and look in.
The two-story farm house is not small,
but under the trees, it looks like a tiny Monopoly building,
proportioning down the manmade world,
amplifying nature and its simple goodness.
 
About the painting and poem
Not a painting but a collage.  For awhile, I made collages and it was simply sheer joy to combine disparate elements into a whole.  I don't have many of those works in my archives because they were very popular in my hay barn gallery, but I hung on to this one because I liked its impish joy.  It has been in several juried shows as well.

The poem harkens back to when I lived on the farm.  I truly loved living there and felt so in touch with nature and its elements.  But I find the same to be true here.  I love everything about this place as much as I loved everything about the old place.  This I believe is one of the secrets to happiness:  love what you have!  Every place, every phase of life has something unique and special about it.  If a person focuses on what they have, feels grateful for everything in their life, it is so easy to feel the joy of living and breathing in this knock-down beautiful world.
 
 

​Order, Order on the Plate
 
Corn is orderly,
the way it’s planted, 
the way it grows,
in rows 
with rows of kernels,
like linebackers
standing in nickel defense.
When eating corn,
move it back and forth
like a typewriter carriage 
or round and round
like a twirling top.
Compare corn to peas,
round and rolling,
ready to travel 
rolling, rolling, 
round your plate.

About the painting and poem
This is one of my abstracts where I  was channelling an image.  In this case, it was farm fields.  There's fences, tractors, crops, sun, snow in there.  If I hadn't told you that, you probably wouldn't deduce that, and that's okay.  The important thing was for me to get it to work visually in terms of design, and I was happy with the end product.  The poem is a nonsense poem.  I felt like I needed to post something light because of this week's grim news.  The rise in Covid cases is alarming, especially as children head back to school. Two more people died in Eau Claire County bringing our death toll to 112.  And even more alarming is the United Nations Report on climate change.  Basically we are past the point where we can undo the climate change that has already happened and if we don't take real action immediately, the planet's climate will be catastrophic.  To me it seems catastrophic enough:  fires here in the U.S., Canada, Turkey, Greece, Algeria to name some of them due to drought conditions; extreme heat here and in Europe (Italy hit a  high temperature never before recorded); species disappearing; more hurricanes.  I needn't go on.  I think of my grandchildren Eleanor, Marguerite, Francis, Oscar, August, and Lydia.  What kind of world will they inherit?  We need cooperation and innovation instead of self-interest and sticking with oil to solve this.  It's bigger than you or me.  All world leaders need to decide they are going to take action to stop the planet's degradation.

​Zinnias

Zinnias wear stars in their crown
golden as a crowned queen,
a circle rising higher, higher,
like climbing Jacob’s ladder.

Showy, rayed heads, 
colored white, chartreuse, yellow, 
orange, red, pink, purple.
Seeds shaped like an arrow 
aimed for your heart.

Zinnias are a long hour 
without minutes ticking,
summer sunshine, 
bird songs in breezes,
butterfly flutter from 
flower to flower.

Zinnis elegans,
is called youth-and-old-age, 
new and old blooms 
sharing the same stem.

If you like bouquets on the table,
plant zinnias you lover of cheer,
you desirer of bright colors, 
you friend of simplicity.

About the painting and poem
I did a series of zinnia paintings when my fervor for the flower was at its zenith.  Painted in watercolors, some were plain, some were stitched with thread on my sewing machine, and some were collaged with text.  At the time, I had a garden bed of zinnias so it was easy to harvest and then paint.  I still love zinnias, but they are more like the memory of an old flame from the past, half remembered, but still making my heart flutter.  Now I have zinnias planted as wild flowers in the strip of land between my property and one of my neighbors.  They are just starting to flower.  Somehow they make the weeds they are growing in look more respectable.

Marigolds

Watch a Bollywood film 
if you want frenzy,
marigolds encircling 
necks, elephants, statues, and
dripping from ears and arms 
as celebrants sing, dance, rejoice.

Marigolds cheer, 
a celebration 
lining walks and beds,
a line of simplicity 
in startling color.

This world likes
 new and better,
latest and greatest, 
gadgetry of the glitterati.
This is a reminder.
Do not forsake 
the modest marigold.
Its wallop is bright. 

About the painting and poem
The abstract watercolor seemed to pair well with my poem celebrating marigolds. This year I started  marigolds myself, although I was a little late getting to that job.  Nonetheless even though the plants weren't ready for putting into the ground until Memorial Day weekend, they are now thriving and putting forth their little bursts of color.  Mine are mostly French Marigolds.  I picked up seeds packets at Dollar Tree and for very little money, I filled the circular flower bed under an oak tree.  An added bonus to their cheerful demeanor is that my omnipresent deer and rabbits don't like them one bit.

Living on the Bank of a River, II
 
When you’re past lovers
husband in the ground
children grown and gone
befriend a river. Discover
how rivers flow, rise, fall, 
ice over, melt, churn,
flash diamonds in sunshine. 
You can watch a river 
every second if you have time. 
You can learn from, listen to, 
and most of all love a river.
Rivers are alive, full of life.
Rivers are relaxed, meandering, 
often carefree. This will rub off.
Watch for discovery of secrets.
Wild things living nearby:
a fisher, a fox, a family of otters.
Don’t tell those secrets.
Sit on the dock, run your fingers
through the surface of the water, 
dangle your feet, submerge them.
Fish. Swim. Boat.
Get to know the river 
like its your new lover.
When a leaf or twig floats by,
cup it in the palm of your hand
to examine. Consider it a gift.

About the painting and poem
The river painting was in a juried show.  It's the second painting in the diptych; the first one I showed last week.  When I wrote the poem, my dock was barely a dock, three wooden structures hugging the shore, but this spring I had a new much larger and nicer dock installed so I am able to do all the things the poem talks about.  And I have done all three things.  I also purchased a sit-upon kayak and have gone out to explore the river on my raft.  I've walked down the dock ladder and swum. The new dock is one of the best improvements I've made in my life since I moved here.  I'm out on the water underneath giant trees and it's like a different world.  I love it!  I usually sit out there at least once a day, for as long as I can.

Living on the Banks of a River
 
I watch the river thirsting
for knowledge of water.
Inside me is ocean.
I long to learn
how it feels to be water, 
how it is to flow free, 
how to change properties,
how to sink deep into ground
yet come up once again. 
I could explore the entire planet 
as a molecule of water, 
free to float, wave, bob, and splash, 
see the Mariana Trench 
in the deepest dark place on earth,
ride the Ganges from its source,
be sweat on the brow of someone
I’ll never know. I want to be
free as water.

 About the painting and poem
I am living a dream in that I live on a river, something I've always wanted.  I watch the river constantly; it's a companion in my daily life.  The water and its flow speaks to me.  Naturally I have painted the river abstractly as well since it's such a strong presence in my life.  How blessed we are that our Wisconsin rivers are clean, that we have so many.  Water is such a precious resource.  Life cannot be sustained without it, and neither could my soul.

My Father’s Potatoes

Boiled leftover potatoes, 
Mother sliced and fried 
in fat slung from the grease container.
Boiled or fried, Dad loved potatoes,
pronouncing it, “bodatoes.” 
“Bodatoes” were his mother’s potatoes,
peeled with her hands and served her way
at the farm table to her boistrous family.

I begged for no pepper on fried, 
wanting only the pure potato taste, 
now golden and crisp.
With boiled, pepper was okay. 
In her rush to get dinner to the table,
Mother shook those copper 
salt and pepper shakers like castanets

In our root cellar, meaty russets,
crisp reds spilled from gunny sacks
onto the dirt floor, exceeding our capacity 
to reach the end before sprouting 
long antennae that were down right frightening
when you had to reach into the bag
to fill a pail with potatoes.  Dad de-sprouted
but we never reached the end.  The last ones 
returned to the garden to make a new crop.  

He liked to plant on Good Friday,
and often did, tilling with his beast of a tiller
rows and rows of black, friable earth.
He said he salivated for the taste of fresh ones
all the while he worked.

He turned our big yard in town into his little farm.
Potatoes from earth, apples from trees, 
tomatoes from vines, corn from stalks,
beans from bushes, that was our food. 
Both parents played their different roles
to fill our mouths, nourish our bodies.
Good earthy food passing through them to us.

About the photo and poem
My poem was published in a Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Annual Calendar a few years ago.  The photo is my father in his work clothes standing in the kitchen where I grew up.  He liked to wear a hat and usually did, but not a baseball cap, a real hat, even though he kept a lot of his hair and never really got gray.  He died at the age of 66 which makes me feel sad whenever I think about how young he really was at his death.  I remember my father with great love.  True, he often traveled in his job as a salesman for Jacques Seed Company, but when he was home, he took us to school on very cold days and had a way of interceding quietly when my mother over reacted to some transgression I committed.  When I attended college at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, it was he who drove me with my things in the fall.  In my teenage years and later, he wrote me an occasional letter to tell me that he loved me and was proud of me.  He loved to read, took a great interest in politics, and attended forums at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire with my mother.  He loved to tell stories, and had a sense of fun about him, though he worked very hard his entire life.  He used to say, "This isn't work!  This is play!" and "I get to go to work today!"  He had a moral code, and believed in the underdog.  I always thought he was handsome.  Dressed up (he loved a good suit), he belied his humble upbringing and roots that he came from.  A modest man, he loved my mother and his daughters and never, ever even implied that he would have liked a son as well.

Big Black Crow

Smooth its flight.
Rough its call.
Like sweet to sour.

About the painting and poem
I selected the painting because of the large black shape, and that it contains green and yellow, the colors of trees and sun.  The poem is short.  Sometimes poems are short and sometimes they are medium, and sometimes long.  I thought it would be good to change it up.