STILL LIFE WITH ZINC BUCKET
Conversation winds around review articles
the contradictions that intimacy and objectivity
cannot help but provoke from inside
this full-frontal still life. Talk curves
common objects, a shard of buried porcelain,
the way a bent garden fork with misshapen clods
this full-frontal still life. Talk curves
common objects, a shard of buried porcelain,
the way a bent garden fork with misshapen clods
of earth states its attachment to the sun.
He assembles and re-assembles
scattered pieces of nature’s detritus
a torn bird’s wing (feather stirring
with striking yellow stripe, the stilled thread
of flight). There are hints at life’s other
layers, the masked existence of geological rhythms
in even the plainest of things. But look,
the space in the picture is collapsing, yet
he stubbornly provides no anchor of table
or solid ground, no convenient mountain backdrop.
Instead he sets the thinnest wash
of silver-grey floating across dampened paper.
of silver-grey floating across dampened paper.
In the end, it is the warped simplicity
of a single zinc bucket that makes me
leave the room to slake my thirst.
CB
For more Tuesday Poems, please click on the quill.
This week's editor is Sarah Jane Barnett. Sarah has posted a TED video of John. G. Rives giving an electrifying performance of his poem Rives Controls The Internet.
