Poem: In a train

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In a train

Never have I loved so well
the life given me
as when I was rocked
by the four o’clock train
from Chicago to Lansing in 1968,
the lap and arms of iron and steel
holding me, window-framed,
a vibrating twelve-year-old witness
to the dusky backside balconies
of yellow brick apartments
with Hancock’s black tower fading behind,
and I, eating the cool green grapes
my married sister packed, cold
fried chicken, a red and white
paper napkin tucked in a brown bag,
lumbering slowly past city windows
reflecting Magikist neon, where red-trim-
aproned women, the same
high-heeled secretaries I’d seen
on Michigan Avenue, were now fingering
the radio knob for jazz or polka while my train
lullabyed me home toward the small town
of my dull, window-gazing life,
but for a few minutes more, still here,
alone, humming along in the city.

Poetry should be heard.

Posted for the dVerse train poem challenge. This is my first time participating in this really terrific poetry community called dVerse Poets Pub hosted today by Claudia Schoenfeld of jaywalking the moon.

Paintings by Edward Hopper: "Approaching the City" and "Woman on a Train"

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synchronizing art & fashion continued: New York Fashion Week Spring 2012

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I painted and designed clothes for fun when I was young. I should have done more with it. Maybe it’s not too late. One way I get my fill of art and fashion now is during the fashion shows when I challenge myself with a visual matching game between pieces of art and new clothes designs. I become a junky looking for color and pattern every day at Fashionologie to see when the next designer’s photos get loaded, and then I go scour online art galleries for matches. It’s creative hedonism. I ignore the news. I forget about poetry. It’s also creative masochism, as my right arm, shoulder and wrist ache with mouse overuse.

My arm will recover, and the somber and complex tapestries of the world will go on being spun without me paying attention for a week. Poems will keep. (But the pears wouldn’t, so Don and I canned six quarts of them after we got home from work last night; bruises and soft spots were spreading.) Of course I was also with our son Peter in spirit through his scary accident when our world did stand still. Thank you for your caring wishes, he is on his way to recovery after reconstructive surgery Monday.

Truly, I look forward to these creations as much as I look forward to morel mushrooms sprouting overnight after April rains when we practically crawl through the woods by the pond and the fallen apple tree scouting for their weirdly beautiful brainy patterns.

I am especially excited by one pairing today. You'll see why in a minute.

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Sometimes a girl just really gets lucky. I don't know how Zac Posen could have designed a suit to look any more Picasso-esque. That peplum on Posen's jacket: serious cubistic hips! Zac Posen, a Manhattanite, first began designing clothes as a boy when he stole yarmulkes from his grandparents' synagogue to make ball dresses for dolls. If you're into clothes like Zac, browse his entire collection of ball gowns, it's simply gorgeous.

Don't you wonder what's happening in this painting?

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 "Interior with a girl drawing" by Pablo Picasso

 Zac Posen suit with Picasso Peplum

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More cubism from Carolina Herrera. Every season this woman's designs knock me out with simple elegance, and this spring collection she does it again. There are actually many cubist paintings of gray that this dress reminded me of, by Braque and Picasso. I settled on Juan Gris.

Painting by Juan Gris

Dress by Carolina Herrera

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Another designer who never fails to satisfy with her confident sense of design and beauty is Donna Karan. She manages to be playful with pattern without being silly. Some of her fabulous collection had pattern, like this, which instantly reminded me of this textile by Lucienne Day, though I had a time finding it, since I didn't know the artist's name. Now that I do, I have learned that Lucienne Day (who just died last year) was a British textile designer who was inspired by abstract art by the likes of Joan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Hellooo! After the print pairing, see the graphic browns and blacks Donna Karan designed, which reminded me of Paul Klee's painting "Intention."

Lucienne Day's textile "Calyx"

Donna Karan dress

Donna Karan

"Intention" by Paul Klee

Donna Karan

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Now here are my favorite pairings. My charming friend George is one of those people who does many things very well. He ponders, writes, travels, walks, paints, photographs and blogs with utter grace and beauty. If you are not yet familiar with his posts at Transit Notes, you are in for a treat for the eyes, mind and spirit. On his sidebar, George has posted a few of his stunning abstract paintings, and it suddenly occurred to me in my last fashion post a few days ago that I might be able to match his paintings with fashion this season. Although I'd hoped to match clothes with more paintings of George's than one (I'll keep looking), I confess I didn't expect to find anything this well matched, by two different designers: Timo Weiland and Peter Som. "Subterranean" is among my favorites of George's work, partly because it represents an invisible world where life swarms and vibrates, like the inner realms we discuss at his blog, the Rilke blog, and elsewhere.

Timo Weiland dress

 "Subterranean" by George McHenry of Transit Notes

Peter Som dress

Suit by Peter Som


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Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; 

and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

~ Luke 12:27

And now for the local show room. These simple jewels around the farm are beautiful in color, form and pattern. Any designer would be envious, and I imagine that songwriter Solomon himself would compare them with his beloved . . . 

My beloved is unto me as a cluster of pokeberries . . .

As the goldenrod in the field glows like the sun, so my beloved's love is to me . . .

My beloved's lips are the color of the sumac blossom, and as soft . . .

You have stunned my eyes, my beloved, with even one of your lips,
red like the sumac leaf . . .

I have come to your garden, my beloved, and gathered your peppers, as colorful as the jewels of my temple, as sweet as flowers and as fiery as the days of our youth . . .

All fashion photos from Fashionologie.

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synchronizing art & fashion: New York Fashion Week Spring 2012

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Venus of Urbino, 1538, by Tiziano (Titian), Uffizi Gallery, Florence

Those maids in the background of Tiziano's painting are looking for her clothes, apparently. Yet she is unconcerned, and so is the artist. Who needs clothes, to be rendered charming?

An answer from Liotard:

Portrait of Maria Adelaide of France in Turkish Costume, 1753

by Jean-Etienne Liotard, Uffizi Gallery, Florence

I love clothes. I don't shop much now, though I love the adventure of thrift shops.

While there is a lot of misery all around, there is also a lot to admire and enjoy, in fact, we need beauty more than ever in such times as these, like bouquets of flowers for a loved one suffering from injury, illness, or loss.

Looking at women in new fashions is my pastime when the seasons of fashion shows arrive, and Thursday was the first day of the New York Spring 2012 fashion shows. Fashion is wearable art, poetry in motion. After last February's fall shows, I had fun compiling a gallery of art pieces paired with designer duds. I first explore the photos from shows at Fashionologie, then scour thumbnails of paintings and sculpture at the Google Art Project and at online museum collections. I look for arresting designs, both in art collections, and in fashion collections. They lead to each other back and forth, like a game of visual tennis. I'm back at it and plan to make galleries until the end of the New York shows next Thursday. We'll see how things go. You just never can tell when you will experience vita interruptus.

Hans Hoffman and BCBG square up, below. I don't think much says "spring" more than spring green:

Cathedral, by Hans Hoffman, MoMA

BCBG design; I really like BCBG;

the dress I wore for Lesley's wedding was this designer,

but I only paid 200 bucks

Imitation showed some beautiful clothes Thursday. Romantic and feminine. I see several artists' work in their dresses, and I'm not done exploring. Tara Subkoff launched the Imitation line after brain surgery a couple of years ago. Talk about obstacles increasing creativity! She is an actress in films like "American Pie" and "The Cell" and previously founded fashion design house "Imitation of Christ" with Matthew Damhave. Was Imitation imitating these pieces of art?

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Imitation and two artists at MoMa:

Imitation

left: Helen Frankenthaler's "Jacob's Ladder";

right: Gertrud Goldschmidt's (Gego) "Sphere"

both at MoMA


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Imitation and Monet:

Imitation

Water Lilies, Claude Monet

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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Imitation and Whistler:

Imitation

The White Symphony: Three Girls, by James McNeill Whistler

Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian


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I love these other designers' collections too.

Graphic blue:

Peter Som dress

Paul Klee's Blaue Nacht


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Graphic yellow and black (or blue) a la Matisse:

Yigal Azrouel

 Henri Matisse

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Sketches by Doo.Ri and Chagall: 
 

dress by Doo.Ri

Joseph sketch, by Marc Chagall


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Graphic gold leaves:

Andy Warhol's Rorschach and dress by Wes Gordon

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Blooming red flowers:

Yigal Azrouel

 Red Cannas, by Georgia O'Keeffe




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Sapphire Matisse blue:

Dress by Jason Wu, and blue nude by Henri Matisse

Those are my standouts from Thursday's and Friday's shows. More to come . . .


February's gallery of synchronized art and fashion for the New York Fall 2011 shows is here.




All fashion photos from Fashionologie

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Cow

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Cow

I love the trapezoid of your broad side:

Blank writing tablet in the grass.
Brown four-legged stool in snow.
Hand rest. Slice of bread, toasted.
Platter. Room divider. Steady wall
for shouldering, thinking. Wagon.
Tank standing or rumbling, peacefully.
Wardrobe, portmanteau, closet.
Leather travel chest. Longing.
Shield. Mother. Father.
Hooved bathtub. Man’s chest.
Bed. Melancholy. Repose.

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Father's Day

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Sunday, June 20 is Father's Day in the U.S. Since I devoted a recent post to my dad (the oak book case), I'm going to focus this Father's Day post on my dad's brother, Uncle Jimmie.

My dad was the pastor, the sun shining from the pulpit. Uncle Jimmie was the moon, the kind of man who could slip by without notice. (Not that I don't always look for the moon when I'm out at night.) Two of his dark losses the poem refers to are losing his wife early, and losing his only child Marjorie in her thirties, in a tragic death. Also born in Virginia, like my dad, he stayed there his entire life. I love how he said "Mrs. Culpepper" -- Mrs. Culpeppah. Maybe the Virginian accent is the most beautiful of all the Southern accents. Uncle Jimmie had the humblest and most loving smile of anyone I've ever known. He was very shy, even physically. You could feel him try to disappear into his skin. Yet somehow he managed to transform himself for us kids when he hand-combed his hair down over his eyes, shrank his tall thin self down, dragging his knuckles on the floor, jutting his lower jaw out and sticking his tongue inside his upper lip to make himself look like an ape, and leapt and oh-oh-ohed monkey gutturals around the room, just to entertain us. I miss him. He was a tremendous man, uncle and father. He died in 1994, and I wrote this poem shortly after that.

"Flying to Uncle Jimmie's Funeral" is a catalog poem. That just means you write lists and descriptions, cataloging something, or many things. So if you look, you can see many catalogs of different things. It's a way of expanding a metaphor, like the moon, into more layers.

Flying to Uncle Jimmie's Funeral

He was not magnetic in life.
We did not gather to him like birds
around a sunrise,
airplanes on the tarmac around the hub of gates,
garden club seniors around flowering dogwoods,
doctors around the bed of a dying man
or mourners around a coffin.
He was not central.

He was adjacent.
Reflective of someone else's glory,
like the moon outside my cabin window,
or the pond reflecting the moon
in the farmer's field below,
a point of interest along the route
under a plane flying somewhere else,
the man in the moon, slightly off center,
shy of looking at you full-faced.

More accurately, he was adjacent
and translucent, the man in the moon
in daylight,
a filmy petal at the side of the sky,
delicately agreeing with the sun,
drawing little attention to himself,
allowing other light, not only to take credit,
but also to define him,
so simply lucid he was.

Still, he was light,
undeniably brighter and warmer than the space
to which he was adjacent.
Now that I have looked long enough to study him
I don't recall that a shadow
ever eclipsed his face even a sliver,
somehow, miraculously staying full
throughout the dark losses
of his life.

Now, he lies in Richmond in a casket,
waiting at the center of all our routes,
my parents, my brother and I from Michigan,
my sisters from California,
Chicago, Atlanta,
and those in Virginia,
his sister from Bridgewater,
his ancient friends from Fredericksburg,
Harrisonburg, Charlottesville.
He is the hub of our spokes,
a magnet guiding our courses,
the point to which we aspire,
the focus of every thought.

I imagine the man in the moon, contained
in a closed box
that can't accommodate the rays,
like his fragile body that condensed power
and couldn't keep it from spilling out
despite his efforts,
beams overflowing,
having the life of a respirator tube,
the beauty of a dogwood branch
and the attraction of
a simple white line on the edge
of the runway that turns out
to be an arrow.


~ Ruth M.
February 1994
Published in the Red Cedar Review May 1994

Listen to me read "Flying to Uncle Jimmie's Funeral", here.

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Saugatuck's Oval Beach

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Place: Abandoned. Wild. Quiet except for a spiky gull's call.

Me: Climbing, like dune grass, or motionless, like fog. Breathing at the pace of waves. I got away from normal [appointments·work·email] to get back to normal [whole·imaginative·energized].

I plan to post a little more from my Small Escape.