Joan Mitchell, “La Grande Vallée XIV (For a Little While)”, 1983.

I've always loved this painting.  Here's a poem
from a while ago, published in qarrtsiluni.

After Joan Mitchell’s La Grande Vallee XIV

as if your blue black blur of brush
and paint can conjure swamp

or luminous maple bud,
tree frog croon

as if layers of saturation can restore
the vernal pool that was my all in all

as if your calligraphy of oil and wash
can contain jack-in-the-pulpit

early fern or tad pole swirl
as if the colors, oh your colors

Cezanne blue Van Gogh sun
flower yellow raging across three panels

as if for a while my rough
ecstasy hasn’t dulled to insight.

where

I've been here this week. Writing. With friends. Not a fancy place
but by the ocean. Every day it is there. For a walk or a look.
And not always wild. Horseshoe crabs littering the beach and
someone said it was molting season. I was molting too.
Shedding old visions of the sheaf of poems I'm making into a book.
Reading them over and over. Seeing it was good.
Into the Forest of Revise to clear and clean.
And a plan for what must be upon return to the Land of Work Etc.
The artist Ann Hamilton said, "Particularity
becomes abstraction." That's where I'm heading.