Poems about other artistic expressions

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The Collage Artist

for Joseph Cornell

You leafed through bits of paper,
discarded starlets,
fragments of others’ hope.

Blue swan, opaque rhythm,
perpetual dance. Stroboscopic saints
were numbered, pigeonholed.
A doll was your mother,

trees grew beneath her dress
when she became a flower.

Planets and lace,
a house in your palm.
The grid across the water:
vast, impassable,
as if rippling were the unity.
The parachute girl
could not land on your heart.

The glass cracked by your own hand,
boxed-in child appropriated,
your dreams the skulls of birds
crying out for cohesion.

at the cinema (or the problem with twisters)

Note the power of the horizontal closeup.  
The impossibly angelic figure.  

The floral print pillow
and the checkered gingham dress.

Watch her swoon. The camera
tracking druggedly back and forth.  

Always the light manipulated into baptismal suggestion.  
All the angles dissolving, reframing themselves.  

Too much color now, it dismantles me.
The road so yellow it makes your teeth ache.

The point at which every detail
becomes a terrible consequence.

That time you bent me over the doll case,
wisteria bending mournfully toward the window.  

The point in the path
where it's too late to turn back.

I learn the aspect ratio of your body.  
The dark mise en scene of your mouth.  

The house inside my head, spinning.
Even the red velvet curtains make me hot.

(Last one, I promise.)

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Francesca

for Francesca Woodman

One day the neighbors abandoned
all the windows, swallowing shoes,
fingers, and I didn’t dream.
The seamen with leather faces
pull women’s bodies from shore,
my mother’s waxen head floating
like an eye. That beautiful
suffocation. I am forever chasing
the woman in the wallpaper,
aching to brush her gray, knotted
hair. In my jeans pockets errant
objects rattle. Black-room
ballerinas, dirty girls. Puppet
girls. Butter knives and broken
light bulbs. They form poltergeists
and scream at the top of their
lungs. I pull from the fountain
lost cameos and puzzle pieces.
We are all fishing hooks and
antique pill cases. How the longing
to carve it into beautiful shadows
was equal to the hunger. Holding
hands by our pinkies, we were lost
children sneaking like worms
through the mirror-land.

Thanks so much for the win--I forgot about this comp, but remember now, all the great entries in it--tough going up against all those, but very cool though. :)