Eulogy For My Mother (Hazel Guggenheim McKinley, Artist)
Flesh lakes of Hazel's colours
Stretch out in the heat
Colours nibbling all over New Orleans
On curls of ribbons of green and wit
And across the canvases stroked by her daydreams
No academy's marble centaur
Diverts her from planting on canvas
Her teasing faces that spy on you
"She tosses away her muffins for eagles
"Far from ossified teachers of cramp"
She needs a canvas from her daydreams
With her recall too giddy for error
Sometimes she tickles upon a canvas
More sounds even than pigment
Her work plans love to erupt
Like a crater of rebels
She's a child who reversed the rainbow
Sketched through chats with artists
Hazel in teasing oils and water colours
Jests at the wash of her products
Her paint brushes have been feathered
Like Argonaut's oars curving through time
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Honeymoon in High Places
Snow chalks borders, the acres from
Blacks and browns with the sun's new turnings
See, that side of the mountain's tanned
This side dark as the ace of spiders.
We joked in bed with the early spring,
Our cabin winked at the peaks' best snowbanks,
We found hope with the horned sheep's noon,
And we learned love from the flesh of winter.
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Alone At A Social Gathering
Some stranger leaves me. Soon I'll be alone.
Which one will choose me when this one is gone?
I look for eyes I know. Each stranger's face
Appals me, knocks me back to memories:
Which one will choose me when this one is gone?
I hated nights when I was five, I'd shun
The changing surfaces of sheets and socks,
Calling their wrinkles monsters out of books,
Dragons and pterodactyls, octopi,
And names the family refused to say.
Old adolescent knows his younger half,
Silent when only talking is relief.
As gossip's chessmen stumble around the gin
To use the mind's blind eye for their spittoon!
"The gifts of God must be too numberless,
"Too good to notice and too close to please."
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