The Collage Artist

(A poem I was fortunate to have published in Wicked Alice literary journal. Inspired by the work of the collage artist Joseph Cornell.)
 
https://www.sundresspublications.com/wickedalice/scales.html
 
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.