Poetry – Spinozablue

Doreen LeBlanc: Two Poems

July 9, 2020 Spinozablue

Edward’s Pout

Why the pout Edward Hopper?
Your many self portraits interchangeable
Turned down mouth
Empty eyes
Stoic
Sour
Brooding
Not a hint of a punch line
But always impeccably dressed
What lies beneath?

Your marriage to Josephine, Jo
Reads rather contentious, tumultuous
Yet she was your subject
Diminutive
Combative muse
Bedraggled nude
Expressionless
Perhaps eating from tin cans
Transformed you both to granite

Brushstrokes of simplicity
Your artistic gifts portrayed loneliness
Dark shadows
Deep thoughts
Solitude
Isolation
Until you created coastal scenes
Where you found light essence
And release

Musings on “Little Goose Girl” by Millet

What have you seen
Simple thatched house
Generations of simple folk
Who patched your humble walls

The geese at your doorstep
Years of harvest and famine
Like the seasons
And phases of the moon

Within, the acrid smells of your hearth
Beside you the giant tree
Your sentinel
Why does this interest me, you ask
Oh, I feel your heartbeat

(Poetry Workshop at Boston Museum
of Fine Arts, French Pastels, with Regie Gibson)

____

The MFA Is Opening a Dreamy (and Rarely Shown) French Pastels Exhibit

____

More Breaths for a Change

May 15, 2020 Spinozablue

County Clare and the Sea. Photo by Douglas Pinson. 2003.

It’s not difficult
But it is impossible
To know when the self Appears unhidden untainted
Bereft of the artificial

Like a diamond in the earth
Before the mines

The rings the false smiles
The campaigns to make us
Feel worthy
It’s not difficult

But it is impossible
To know the moment
Most extreme
The highest highs

The lowest lows
That remain ours
Alone
Pristine

Primordial

— The ancients told us
It was in the Middle Way
That we decipher
That we sync and connect

With what is true
With what is unhidden
Only in that time and place
Between things and events

But I wander
And fall toward
The Romantics
And their post-Baroque

For advice
For succor
Their wisdom
And excess

Their rejection of Hamlet times
Of indecision and hesitation

Jump and ye shall find!!… |To be Continued “More Breaths for a Change”

How to be Human for a Breath or Two

May 13, 2020 Spinozablue

Pandora’s Box, by John William Waterhouse. 1896

The visitation of a blessing
The moment of passion changes us
But the man thought he saw something
That wasn’t there until

Until he saw her as she really was
As she really was because of him

Looking back on his Columbus days
On his belief that thousands and thousands
Of years could be negated by a ship
He knows now that it wasn’t so

That what was special about her
Was special with or without him
That while his own being impacted her
It did not could not create her

Beyond his own mind
His own dreams of essences lost and found

The Beatles said
We become nay-ked
The Beatles said
Let it be

Kierkegaard said
Life can only be understood
Backwards
But it must be lived

Forwards

Are we ever really human
For a breath?… |To be Continued “How to be Human for a Breath or Two”

Zen Fields Beyond the Canvas

February 16, 2020 Spinozablue

Flaming June, by Frederic Leighton. 1895. Museo de Arte de Ponce.

You were my dream
So the poets say
So they spin and wrack their minds
How to express what can not be

Love
Love of
Love of her
Of life

Of the stars
Anything that crisscrosses
Their eyes and ears
Their fifth or sixth dimension

Like the waves they see
As stand-ins for her
Like the mountains they see
As symbols of her strength

The irony the melancholy
Of it all is
Of course the non-abstract
Nature of her

The total lack of symbology
In the way she moves
The way she smiles
Only when it’s necessary

Only when there is nothing else
To be done

She smiles at the perfect time
In a perfect way

Thus rendering all symbols
All analogies all parables
Superfluous
At best

She was my dream
Because of that
Her dreamless self
The beyondness

Of it all
The stark raving madness
Of it all
As if no art were necessary

As if no dreams were needed
     Or possible
          Created
               Or imagined

Or pinned to page or canvas
By us
For us
She did not require them!!… |To be Continued “Zen Fields Beyond the Canvas”

Never Ever!!

February 11, 2020 Spinozablue

Edouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. 1882

There are blue fields to love
And red oceans
Of course
Plus black rain on May Day

But it’s always been
At least for me
The sheer genius of flannel clouds
That knocks me for a push-pull

Or two or seven loops
Like a child’s long shout out
To our morning goddess
After they’ve had their swim

Their cereal their prize-winning song
After they’ve frozen their dreams
For the image-zoos
The butterbread-museums

The psychic kaleidoscopes of yore
And I know what you’re thinking

That all this is passé
So old-melted hat

So rolled-up thunder-eyed
Yes yes this is true
This is just a was once removed
But I ask you sweet madam

Isn’t this was a better land
A better plated sojourn
Than our pubs can serve last week?… |To be Continued “Never Ever!!”

The Anthropology of Magical Forms

February 2, 2020 Spinozablue

Sigmund Freud. Photo by Max Halberstadt. 1921

I want to discover the magical links
Before they appear

Though to be honest I’d much
Rather actually see them
Than invent them whole-cloth
or whole-sale

Wouldn’t it be great if that were to happen?
Hallucinate my way into poetic fusions
Instead of just writing them?
Instead of twisting myself

Into pretzels alchemically
With nonsense salt
On top
Or on the plate?

This is what it all comes down to
For poets seers prophets and
Kitchen repairmen
Who turn the world upside down

This is what it means to have
Rimbaud’s gift
Lost too soon
To guns in Abyssinia.… |To be Continued “The Anthropology of Magical Forms”

The Ironies They are a Changin’

January 22, 2020 Spinozablue

Ulysses and the Sirens, by John William Waterhouse. 1891

Different times blah blah blah
Call for different blah blah blahs

As in
Right now there is no reason
For all of those blah blahs
And extra blah blahs

None

We need to be direct!
Tell it like it is
And not worry so much about
Offending the cliché police

The earth the sea the once blue air
The glaciers the beleaguered soil

The fires this time

So instead of stories about this or that
Neuroses
This or that endlessly nuanced set of
Ironic distances

It’s time for swords
Right under your nose
And clear cut goals
Right under your nose

And beating hearts
Right under your nose
Or
Wherever they typically go

When they need immediate attention
When they need immediate care

Of course fables and parables and
Allegories and multiplex symbology
Still rule always rule will always
Rule

But on some level it’s got to be
Night and Day

Right vs wrong
Because all this ironic detachment
Has led to exactly the wrong kind of
Simplicity and lack of nuance

So ring that bell
     Bang that drum
          On key
          On time

Spinozablue

An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

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Category: Poetry