Clyfford Still at the Hirshhorn
With impasto implying a phantom hand, a painter bequeaths a black canvas with a gashed red hole which I stop to inspect, then cannot recollect how I entered—returning without words to the retrospective exhibit—as outside September leaves detach adrift past fat sparrows who dive at worms and chimera.
Heading home, we glance back to where the museum touches grass in the twilight and feel more naked and more clothed.
Sharing the Wound
I like it here, beyond signposts and summaries, says the painter Clyfford Still to a friend who’s moving to the hill country “forever.” Yes, says Still, we all should disappear into what we must do.
For my part, I travel, often alone, as you note, into a wounded opening on canvas to enter the crater, explore its cause, how I’ve been altered, to greet the color of healing that happens through welcomed exposure.
Among the orchards of the farm where you’ll work, what awaits inhabiting? I no longer care much for labels. We enter our endeavors to learn. Let’s call this one: “1944-N No. 2.”
Farewell, my friend, for you and I are like two seekers pausing at the river to dive into the rushing and parting with the same shared stuff.
“Sharing the Wound” first appeared in Issue 75 (2024) of The Potomac Review
Stealth of Spring
I forgot again so much error in the rear view on jaunts through the dusk with bursts from the sparrows, admiring their looped flights in the cool air, warming to lost loved ones like dormant roots.
After breakfast on walkabouts through March sunspots, I welcomed April winds that gallop and prance as if the cool noses of loose pets nuzzle buds before on route to what’s next.
From above birds flood for perches and still call out from inside evergreens and pines, from atop maples and oaks until May’s bouquet seats a chorus. Squirrels munch nuts and eye my coming. A robin hops near but hears from me no singing. At woodsy patches among the cul-de-sacs of homes, deer graze in packs. A few glance back. Everything speaks to me yet leaves me speechless.
I might as well be an older oak with warmth for younger creatures scurrying below not yet ripe to hold the frost we harbor as keepsake. I’ll savor strolling with sojourns for outdoor yoga, arms stretched sunward, all of which bounces down an internal well where ache and joy dwell like some sort of watery blended twin.
I’ll practice again when to abide in the pose, when again to let go, while inhaling Spring’s becoming because the heart too has cycles.
These flowers are a long time coming to fan their comingled scents, never fully falling from us, colors in the sunrise, rosy cheeks.
G.H. Mosson is the author of Family Snapshot as a Poem in Time (FLP 2019), co-author of Simultaneous Revolutions (PM Press 2021), and three other books. His poetry has appeared in The Tampa Review, The Evening Street Review, Smartish Pace, and The Hollins Critic. For more, seek www.ghmosson.com.