THE LANDSCAPE
I’ve never liked abstract art.
With Turner and the moody Dutch, you always knew what you were getting. A ship was a ship was a ship. Roiling cloud, dusk smoke and lamps branches spidering the snowy bank.
But this. This is a right mess.
The colors are all wrong, for a start. Here a stripe of red cut off mid-stride a slash of triangular green and pink. Is this meant to be a field of flowers their bright dark bulbs and feather arms raised and shaking?
These grotesque fevers, they’re supposed to be the play of sunset on the furrows of a softly ploughed field, the grass and ranch lands of northern California saluting? It doesn’t look like Berkeley at all, you hippies.
These peach-pie lines here shooting off of the blackness, are they time’s shadow clinging to your skin? The etchings of age on your hands, unwash-off-able your fingers twitching paint aching to rip the color open, to turn it inside out.
Tell me how anyone could understand it these burning yellow thoughts these sheafs of dreamed up blue and green hiding the heavens, all squared up and bursting out from every part of you?
Claire Basarich
BURIAL; OR, THE BIODEGRADABLE COFFIN POEM
You are nothing but a carbon Midas. Everything you touch turns to policy reports. The kid showed his electric pace and I was a ball of nerves. A slow cow farts. The little girl mistakes a pylon for the Eiffel Tower. You may as well griddle the grid. My window is full of propellers. If all my statements include their own history, then how can we start? Let’s demolish the old town baby for I’m already wasting on several fronts. After the poem I’m spent like a cartridge, like money. Oh honey we’ve so far to go so follow my flow till I’m sunk for a sink in a coffinless grave.
Tom Chivers
Taken from his new collection, Dark Islands, available from Test Centre Press.
ORIGINAL FAULT
