From Content
Van Gogh, Landscape At Twilight
- forthcoming in The Book of Insects (Spruce Street Press)
A feverflower and toadflax shine
laid on in strokes like agitated flocks
of birds fanning out behind the layer of visible
twilight. Wheat and marigold colors. An ochre
road bisects the fields and ends where sight does
in two pinched-off nubs, like short dark strings Atropos
will soon cut off. (The same road painted by another
could brighten again at sunrise, might continue on
through the tangled fig-violet thicket he has wedged
at the horizon beyond the iris roof of the chateau
between pear trees.) Someone leans through a window
gone long ago to ruin, in the musk of evening's damp
grain and floral scents. A single quick stroke of ivory
black conceals her figure in a sunless brick
of shadow. We see - or imagine we do -
how one bare arm stretches deliciously into the oncoming
night, into the racket of blue flies, while the sun turns
everything to fire again, then dies.
(That blue roof still holds steady against the torrent of sky.)
Chagall's Bride and Groom
Her gown is hooped
like a Conestoga;
she wishes
he had traded it
for a sensible
parachute.
The wind
from an orange star
drags her
wedding veil.
The groom's head
pivots, nearly
tugged off. His hair
is the shiny color
of tuxedoes.
But she is tired of his
face like a chalk
boutonniere,
how he stares backward
like her mother
at the earth below,
vaguely
dotted with primroses -
she wishes he would let go
the white stem
of her wrist!
Susan Kelly-DeWitt
- Susan Kelly-DeWitt is poet and painter who holds a B.A. and M.A. from CSU Sacramento. She has exhibited her art at Excentrique Gallery, SMUD Gallery, Matrix Gallery, Phoenix Gallery, Blooming Art, Original Works, Peach Pit/Barton Gallery, State Capitol Cafeteria Gallery, Archival Framing, Accurate Art Gallery, Sutter Creek, Winkler Gallery and Davis Art Center. She is a past recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship for Poetry from Stanford University. She has published four collections of poetry; her work also appears in many national anthologies and journals.
