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poems & paintings

by Edward Harsen

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2014 © Edward Harsen

Published by Edward Harsen

and Pushmixx Media Corporation

llgrasssandsandsandsandsandsand

wallstonewallstonewallstonewall

PAINTING Dimock, PA page 2 pen and pencil on paper Yellow sky/Blue flowers page 4 acrylic on canvas 18x24 Woman reclining with shawl page 6 oil on canvas 18x24 Field with fence page 8 water color on paper Blue car page 10 water color on paper Snow scene page 12 acrylic on wood panel Travelscape page 16 acrylic on canvas panel 16x20 Sunday page 18 acrylic on canvas 18x24 The round clouds page 20 acrylic and spray paint in wood panels The pool page 22 acrylic on canvas 24x36 Blue flowers page 24 acrylic and latex on wood panel 24x40

POEMS Vance, Keeper of Earthquakes page 3 I Am the Only Means of Escape page 5 An Economy of Souls page 7 Personal Ritual Sacrifice page 9 How Age and Winter Lately page 11 Perception into Intuition page 13 Garden page 15 How Could I Lose Sight of Beauty page 17 Sunday page 19 Round Clouds page 21 Peripherally Mindful page 23 Entering the Landscape page 25

Vance, Keeper of Earthquakes

My buddy Vance is a pipe-fitter. He'll hang a handrail, yeah, but he's certified to sweat copper, silver and stainless. Vance got a gig across the state line from Leatherstocking on the north PA shale shelf running gas rig hydraulic drills. The family stays back at Catskill so he takes his time off at the tavern. Like migrant pay, he says, isn't it, while the pockets are pumped out, the kids make it into middle school and Vance smokes seven dollar- a-pack shit cigarettes real slow since there's no rush to retire. We expect some Elmira coroner will open Vance up eventually, either his heart or lungs gone, and find the destruction of Dimock.

I Am the Only Means of Escape

On this planet where starlight turns pink, I capture a fleet Kelley's lily and amber rose, a butterfly bush, burned and bright, under the green frond-fringed bluebell sky. Each mud or brown moss step differs for distance against the evaporated canvas of heat and fog in long morning air. Soon an alien August sun brooks low enough, bounding glare, to toll the further tread into autumn, hinting that least winter gray night is warmer than weak light. I advance on the fastening frost, my red maples turn brilliant crimson, sweet birches golden yellow, sourwoods turn brick red, all the yellow buckeyes orange.

An Economy of Souls

Setting aside what you may think, this water evaporating from their west to precipitate over your east coast, you drink, and bathe in what rises from their south sea to course through your north mountain feeders. Just so, as they there hunger, we grow weak; when you have no home, he feels such cold; she sleeps in fever, and you dream our demons. Each wears the other's surplus clothes. The shot and unburied bodies blot against our skin. Understand: we breathe the same, the same particles of air, as each breathes. No distance stands between us, no difference. I plead for passage, you are my path past death, to heaven, as I am yours.

Personal Ritual Sacrifice

Coyote-footed night swirls in on swift dry clicks of oak leaves dancing for the mustard sunset. There's no telling what I'm prepared to do with the vacant field, fenced against lopers and trotters, now navigated best by bats. White tails will graze long after dawn tomorrow, and rust-banded woolly bear caterpillars flow into winter on sap's slowing tide. I'll tell you the devices of the spell I've etched in creek water, if you promise to panic, burn me at the stake, noon.

Perception Into Intuition

This is not the whole story, but more than food or phones, geese in flight draw my eyes away from the road, driving to the cement block office or some lush deciduous park, its cold, moss-split stream falling over the clef and staff of sedimentary stone. And the moraine is not a whole story, with granite and lime to one side, black composite asphalt coating the oak and ivy lined loop up to the stick-built home, where we reluctantly take firm steps to ease the children from time's periphery into being people, as distractive and astonishing as if they'd taken flight. In the picture book of our tale, you’d see photons chip away at my skin and know how the insulating details escaped into a leaf-filtered sitting room, the dust of inattention drifted in jackets over chair backs and a week's stacked mail, and, eyes glancing across my shoulder, you'd noticed a drawing of goose down. I incorrectly recall my life as the life of the moon's atmosphere, my empty night now packed with chlorophyll day, the slantless unimpeded sunlight burning into Taghkanik Hills, and if asked will swear I had taken a cool morning cruise, along which I thought only of love and how to tell when love needs a teller.

How Age and Winter Lately

In some hurricane with a troubled-cat name, I'm scrying who will hear from me a mindless tuneless whistle. I've split the furniture one patio set of my brain from another, an old rail fence from the next desk. It is the full moon who assumes he know the forest, even as his light lessens and is lost over the course of narrowing crescents, then returns chastened to wax cracking into late autumn cold. Leafless sycamores wave warning in the ghostly snow of moonlight on earth. Birches snapped three storms ago, we lost locusts last year when the beech crown came down. The owner of the pond took it with him when he died about a month ago: His daughter saw him walk on it the night he died. I had to steal from Dali what sky I could paint.

Garden

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How Could I Lose Sight of Beauty?

dangly heron luft over the northbound freeway blue brushes on white a Samba Pa Ti in ten second note sustain holds our swaying steps fabric silhouette of Queen Ann's Lace wallpaper taupe against scarlet loom fingers tap tap plaited grain through yesterday today tomorrow

Sunday

Fly, morning light, from your sycamore escorts, wash the slate clouds white and ignite teeming leaves along the marionette willow limbs. Soon enough, through the darkened barn door, you'll swell the sweetened hay swaths to scent our hewn cathedral, but first, warm this wedge of turf, put to plough and dug with dung, ready to bear corn kernels.

The Round Clouds

In dusk as blue as deeply cut muscle, the clouds that bear her falling body are round and unrepeating, the way Botticelli’s colors sounded to Respighi, whole tones calando. Humid June air swells between a million small red maple leaves when she seems most still, at night, declining among the venerable people of the skies.

Peripherally Mindful

In the pool open truly to the yard, sky, I skim a wind's flippancy of fir and white pine needles, a million red maple leaves draped like tiny apprentices to the past, one lime-bright locust frond. What I know of chlorine makes basic adjustments to future algae, green and black, beetles abide, bloated frogs tire, turn and float.

Entering the Landscape

Corn going to seed steals yellow sun from the brow of marigold and a quilt of silvery lupine. Across the August afternoon runs a humid belly of roiled rain, then the tick and pop of hail as ponds pond. East of Kline Kill, a mown field grows and will whiten with the next snow, months away but sure again: it's yet midsummer. Littered into this road cut excavation like the rusted Schlitz cans or rhus vernix, I have thrown myself into the trees that now can scream green no louder.

2014 © Edward Harsen

Published by Edward Harsen

and Pushmixx Media Corporation