5.0 out of 5 stars
It would inspire an off Broadway Presentation, August 20, 2009
This review is from: Clotheslines: A Collection of Poetry and Art (Hardcover)
On "Clothesline" A Show she failed to see into Production
My mother in law was dying of cancer and our connection was tenuous.
It was a time when saying to her anything was tantamount to saying the wrong thing.
She was dying with the determination that she had to do so artfully and with flair,
Planning a memorial down to the hat
That sat stage side as she answered
All the world's a stage
She was a player on this floorbaord, no less a theatrical connoisseur
Dressing in the way of Greta or lining an eye as if on a barge
It would hold me in appreciation of the art of looking,
But I was miles away, to think about her days, in the five year ticking bomb
That blew almost to the moment of it's starting.
So I sent her something every month for five years,
except in the last 6 months when it just seemed impossible to find things as more than things,
Her kid primed to project has shorn my hide in the following years, forfeiting notice of that doing,
But the photo albums, flowers, drawings and volume of poetry were
All one had to give. (And maybe fairly meant so little to the tests she was taking.)
What I might want, maybe, if we were to switch seats.
The other cheek, a volume.
She had this beautiful Chinese pale silk she wore
In her evenings and mornings rising
That one finds in this book.
One of her favorites, never mind how she found it.
She said she performed some of this volume as pieces in small theater she did
One picture made me think of her in her trailing greetings in a morning, buttering the toast
Here in this volume are artworks of what probably might never hang strictly on any clothesline
But hang, yes, as artworks of clothes, feminine, she loved to dress
To dress up, to be seen wearing
To be spied in something eclectic or rare
As one might feel about stealing a bite
out of a fig after a long dry spell in idaho
It was exceedingly pleasant to see what she chose to put on of a day.
And next to this art in the volume sent was a poem, equal, greater, measured response to the work
As she and I sat peering at one another,
Across our talents.
It's hard, in a way, for artists to meet across the personage of son and lover
Rather like a dual that left both of us diminished
For it forming.
But we danced awhile over the collections that I'll be sharing here over this review,
This book a woman's treasure, equal to a man's wandering eye
Poetry of what we clothe our desires, heart, child and warrior in, or behind
And what we wear when walking out to be viewed, shed of artifice.
It is a book that stands there Dior, and desperate at the same time.
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