Art in Bloom
Moored in a suburb I had never sought to know
before last winter’s ice put paid to my unaided
city life, I join the dozers at the Riverscape Retirement
Home assembled in the Heron Meeting Room,
where they affirm for Management, who chose the color
scheme, the calming influence of eau de nil.
Our visitors, by contrast, come and go:
not talking of Michelangelo, but of the video
their local garden club’s composed —
and any moment now, we’ll get to view —
of floral installations at my much-missed
art museum all this endless month of Art in Bloom.
These women, or their like, are what impelled me
to desert the galleries each May;
encroaching on my haunts proclaiming Love of Art,
but fixed more frankly on an early lunch and hearty gab
beside a phlox approximation of Italian lace.
Food and flowers, pictures no one looks at on the wall:
isn't that what we have restaurants for? I’m counting —
faintly, I’ll concede — on this dim hope:
that just beyond the image of some chum of theirs
admiring thistles in a pot, the camera has caught
a painting — any painting — that I once consumed
in slow, exquisite mouthfuls, face to face.
Alas! A crumb of Van der Weyden here,
of Sargent there; a slice of Copley in the interstice
between a twig concoction and a bangled wrist,
leave me more famished than before.
Next year, confirming Management’s suspicion
that I lack the Riverscape esprit,
I won’t attend this annual, I’m told, delicious treat.
I’ll feast abstemiously on our Water View,
I'll wave to Charon, on retainer at the dock.
And when these women ride the elevator
to my floor, replete with photos like the ones
they’re stacking now, so Those Unable to Come Down
can sample measured bites of Art in Bloom,
I’ll ask the aide who looks like one of Gaugin’s
‘Two Tahitian Women’ if she’ll guard my door
and tell them I don’t care for art.
Blame Game
In the years before the blaze,
Notre Dame became a girl again.
Bleached of centuries of grime,
her skin grew creamy with the glow of youth.
Saints and sinners sculpted round her portals
shared a scrubbed air of new beginnings,
tarnish purged ungrudgingly from each.
Young tourists, raucous in the packed cathedral square,
giddy with a new freedom from parental rules,
pinned their boasted dalliance with risky Paris ventures
on a history of second chances readily bestowed.
High above the living bodies and the hewn,
separated from each other by the grandiose rose
window; exiled even from the gallows comfort
of their fellow-damned carved in multitudes below,
two stone figures, overlooked and overlooking,
grieved: Adam, cleansed, but not forgiven, Eve
stiff with disbelieving shock.
Bad apples, spreading rot throughout the human barrel,
how convenient, that unpracticed pair! Church fathers
held this truth to be self-evident: our tainted state
derived from them — or more precisely, her.
Marred from birth by their corruption, how could we,
their fallen heirs, attain reprieve? Who but the Church
could help us to atone?
As strewn beams from Notre Dame’s vaulted ceiling
charred the nave, a wall of water, flung with Old Testament
velocity, saved the west façade, leaving those two useful
scapegoats to reprise the roles the centuries had forged for them:
salt the wounded conscience of a chastened congregant
or sullied priest; ease the rest of us, since nothing,
strictly speaking, is our fault.
Ceri Eagling grew up in Wales, lived six years in France and is a long-time resident of the United States, currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing reflects each of these experiences. Strict meter is an integral part of traditional Welsh poetry and she feels its influence in every poem she writes. Her poems have been published in Antiphon, Allegro Poetry, Verse-Virtual, Riggwelter, The Wild Word, Songs of Eretz, and the anthology, Up Your Ars Poetica. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared elsewhere.
Pulsebeat Poetry Journal 