Still Life with Dissolving Figures
Stone wall overgrown with bracken,
poison ivy, bay berries, green forest
moss and mushroom caps, a density
of morning fog conceals dissolving
figures, their movement unfettered
by unrestricted growth: limbs brittle
as tree branches, brush swayed by
off-shore winds, nether regions dissolving
within the tree line, nothing assured about
their passage, the elusiveness of their
presence; a figment of sight the remains
obscured by false dawn light.
Franz Marc’s Battling Forms (1914)
A piece of Klee,
geometric, tarnished
as the skin of martyrs
uprooted from their
graves;
the hell they were
interred in no longer
consecrated ground
but something profaned,
damaged by earthquakes,
artillery barraging;
their rude crosses bent,
dismantling, even eternity
markers impermanent as
the town’s people who
died here breathing mustard
gases;
their collective exhalations
a poisonous cloud, a pale
horse, pale rider nightmare
wrenched from Chagall’s
worst dream;
all of Munch’s lost tubercular
children gathered behind
locked church doors balanced
on the edge of a precipice;
or like a Kandinsky composition
in red, a folk dream inside a blood
red chamber, the one the artist
never finished, the one no one
could ever finish.
Alan Catlin is not the Wizard of Menlo Park though he lives in Schenectady,New York, as he has for many years. He has published dozens of chapbooks and full length books of prose and poetry, the most recent being Alien Nation, a compilation of four thematically related chapbooks of poetry.
Stone wall overgrown with bracken,
poison ivy, bay berries, green forest
moss and mushroom caps, a density
of morning fog conceals dissolving
figures, their movement unfettered
by unrestricted growth: limbs brittle
as tree branches, brush swayed by
off-shore winds, nether regions dissolving
within the tree line, nothing assured about
their passage, the elusiveness of their
presence; a figment of sight the remains
obscured by false dawn light.
Franz Marc’s Battling Forms (1914)
A piece of Klee,
geometric, tarnished
as the skin of martyrs
uprooted from their
graves;
the hell they were
interred in no longer
consecrated ground
but something profaned,
damaged by earthquakes,
artillery barraging;
their rude crosses bent,
dismantling, even eternity
markers impermanent as
the town’s people who
died here breathing mustard
gases;
their collective exhalations
a poisonous cloud, a pale
horse, pale rider nightmare
wrenched from Chagall’s
worst dream;
all of Munch’s lost tubercular
children gathered behind
locked church doors balanced
on the edge of a precipice;
or like a Kandinsky composition
in red, a folk dream inside a blood
red chamber, the one the artist
never finished, the one no one
could ever finish.
Alan Catlin is not the Wizard of Menlo Park though he lives in Schenectady,New York, as he has for many years. He has published dozens of chapbooks and full length books of prose and poetry, the most recent being Alien Nation, a compilation of four thematically related chapbooks of poetry.