Art Lessons. Ann Iverson
to bone
to flight and to somehow
I matter not in any of it.
STORM
The wolf howls a blue moon
and throws it to the sky
like the last of Van Gogh’s
invading strokes of orange.
The final wails of the dying
can release the colors too.
Phone rings at 3:00 a.m.
What is real the receiver
does not know by heart.
This is for the mentally ill
the wild colors of their minds
the deep and lonesome country
friends and family wander.
TO KNOW A SNOW ANGEL
Is to love
what will wash away
with the wind
and drifted days.
Her wings will fade
so gently
into the blanched sky.
Deer might come to see
what has dissolved.
There are no lights
on a distant tree,
no sleigh bells,
no ringing of anything
anywhere.
THEORY ON COLOR
When we placed our mother
in the snow to rest
we dressed her in a purple sweater
for fear she would be chilled.
Our father stood behind
and gasped my wife.
That was 20 years ago.
Time has come and gone.
Some days have stayed too long
others gone too fast.
Her only sister still wears red,
though I never see her. News is
she takes classes at a local college,
but even that was years ago.
Two weeks before my mother died,
she lent me money for a coat.
She left with me in debt to her.
Of course that’s how it went.
I tried to pay my father back
but he would not receive it.
Here, in fact, it’s red, not green that lives.
And purple sings from silent snow.
ALMS
Dawning on her
that it wasn’t a public mass,
the homeless woman, sweet and slow of mind,
slipped out as unobtrusively
as she had slipped in
to sit at the front row of the Assumption Church,
closer to the altar than any of the family.
Between the homily and the eulogy,
she floated back in
and placed
a package of powdered donuts
on the pedestal
next to the urn
of my father’s ashes.
Next to the man
who loved his pastries.
Beside the man
who always said I’ll make it up to you … Near the man who never held his head too high.
Beside the man
whose mother
widowed, poor,
then finally drunk,
gave food to those with even less,
to me,
pennies off her dresser.
THE SCATTERING OF ASHES
For A
I am every cool breeze
and bite on the lake
when the fish follow
and the water reads your mind.
I am the tree of resolution
against a gray November sky.
I am the heart of the fleeting deer.
I follow the rolling hills at dusk
to the little fork in the road
where I’ll find you in your dreams.
AFRAID TO SLEEP AND THEN AFRAID TO WAKE
Alone after the death of two fathers
That you might not open the morning first
or tighten the lid to the day.
Accustomed to you and feeling
in-comprehensible, though I know
if you were here, you would understand.
Innocent sounds enter the house and become
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