From sidereality
The Music Chamber (Why I am not Matisse)
Josepha Gutelius
I started a painting
of two girls and a mother.
The girls sit at a piano
with their faces turned away.
Why, I don't know.
Are they looking for some
forgotten light,those wounded lovelies?
The curtains are half-drawn.
A lovely noon. I haven't decided
how many colors to let in.
So far the girls are huddled ink --
in a stupor maybe
from my endless wavering.
(Should they wear pink? Are they any less innocent
if I smear them in gray wash?)
A dwarf figure, more like a stump
howls by the garden door.
Yes, they are lookingtoward it -- toward Mother.
Crazy, I will admit,
but I hear her too.
A howl from a stump.
Wait. The piano's slippery keys.
Are those what they feel?
The one girl, rapt,
picks a rhythm on the keys,
a drowsy ping,ping,
like wax dripping on doilies.
Queenly steel blue eyes that bleed
???
No! Wrong: gleam.
A gleam of black and steely something
slips down from Mother's sleeve:
How on earth
did she get in?
Quick, erase the arm, the bleeding whatsit --
Too late,
I've brought in a note of savagery:
I'm watching, I can't intervene.
Everything's on a grim course
of inevitability.
There and there and there, beating with their tiny fists
the girls pounce on the knife
in a rush and Mother falls --
A charcoal saint
in bloodied crinoline.
How did it happen?
I wanted two girls, a mother,
a music chamber, a sweetly tender scene....
All the smiles that a mother could wish.
And then came the stray thought, bleed.
© Copyright 2004 Josepha Gutelius
Josepha Gutelius
The Argotist Online
Home Articles Interviews Poetry Submissions Links
Josepha Gutelius
Josepha Gutelius has two poems online in SideReality. Her play Two Hands won a 2004 New Play Award from Theater Conspiracy and was produced lately in NYC.
Mirror to Mirror
Leave your sleepy rivulets to trickle down my wrist,
teacher. Put up a mirror for an answer
so I can ask the same thing twice
Seal shut last year’s envelopes, your lesson’s feral cabinet,
Say, The mirror is facing the wall, so my secrets are safe
Don’t ask me,
“Dear little cobweb: why so brooding, mysterious, and quaking?”
Don’t say, I’ll seize this and this and this
Leave everything
like the sun, when nobody’s watching
melted down for sheer moonlight.
For Bob Arner
During fall’s last rehearsal
the wind spoke to earth in quarter inches, pacing each dropping leaf
to the plash of the water
losing itself in a zillion facets of ice
The pond gives way to broken glass,
ghosts of objects, gray-bodied, crying out in a witchy voice
Hello bone of my foot
Hello kiss me starry sky
when ghost birds with baby cries
flap like stray scrap across the
brassy garden
We will someday assemble an art together
that is all of that
copyright © Josepha Gutelius
The Music Chamber (Why I am not Matisse)
Josepha Gutelius
I started a painting
of two girls and a mother.
The girls sit at a piano
with their faces turned away.
Why, I don't know.
Are they looking for some
forgotten light,those wounded lovelies?
The curtains are half-drawn.
A lovely noon. I haven't decided
how many colors to let in.
So far the girls are huddled ink --
in a stupor maybe
from my endless wavering.
(Should they wear pink? Are they any less innocent
if I smear them in gray wash?)
A dwarf figure, more like a stump
howls by the garden door.
Yes, they are lookingtoward it -- toward Mother.
Crazy, I will admit,
but I hear her too.
A howl from a stump.
Wait. The piano's slippery keys.
Are those what they feel?
The one girl, rapt,
picks a rhythm on the keys,
a drowsy ping,ping,
like wax dripping on doilies.
Queenly steel blue eyes that bleed
???
No! Wrong: gleam.
A gleam of black and steely something
slips down from Mother's sleeve:
How on earth
did she get in?
Quick, erase the arm, the bleeding whatsit --
Too late,
I've brought in a note of savagery:
I'm watching, I can't intervene.
Everything's on a grim course
of inevitability.
There and there and there, beating with their tiny fists
the girls pounce on the knife
in a rush and Mother falls --
A charcoal saint
in bloodied crinoline.
How did it happen?
I wanted two girls, a mother,
a music chamber, a sweetly tender scene....
All the smiles that a mother could wish.
And then came the stray thought, bleed.
© Copyright 2004 Josepha Gutelius
Josepha Gutelius
The Argotist Online
Home Articles Interviews Poetry Submissions Links
Josepha Gutelius
Josepha Gutelius has two poems online in SideReality. Her play Two Hands won a 2004 New Play Award from Theater Conspiracy and was produced lately in NYC.
Mirror to Mirror
Leave your sleepy rivulets to trickle down my wrist,
teacher. Put up a mirror for an answer
so I can ask the same thing twice
Seal shut last year’s envelopes, your lesson’s feral cabinet,
Say, The mirror is facing the wall, so my secrets are safe
Don’t ask me,
“Dear little cobweb: why so brooding, mysterious, and quaking?”
Don’t say, I’ll seize this and this and this
Leave everything
like the sun, when nobody’s watching
melted down for sheer moonlight.
For Bob Arner
During fall’s last rehearsal
the wind spoke to earth in quarter inches, pacing each dropping leaf
to the plash of the water
losing itself in a zillion facets of ice
The pond gives way to broken glass,
ghosts of objects, gray-bodied, crying out in a witchy voice
Hello bone of my foot
Hello kiss me starry sky
when ghost birds with baby cries
flap like stray scrap across the
brassy garden
We will someday assemble an art together
that is all of that
copyright © Josepha Gutelius
