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If Jasper Johns Was a Poet


I relearn my numbers in a grid

arranged in the Chinese style,

Beginning with the five in the center,

I surround it with a zero,

that mystery that makes base ten

possible, along with our fingers and toes.

One is wrapped in a vine of flowers.

The roof of my seven slopes

like a hat tipped over the forehead,

surrounded by a stand of evergreen trees.

Four becomes a beach sky, the sun high

and filled with gulls in flight.

My eight has goo-goo-googly eyes

Behind a pair of black framed glasses.

Two is swamped with waves.

Three got caught in an orange explosion.

Six surrenders to an eighth note.

Nine bears a naval orange tree loaded

with ripe fruit. Welcome to new math!






Lately I’ve been feeling overwhelmed by poetry as a business, filled with deadlines and editorial responsibilities. (My book Quince, Rose, Grace of God is approaching its publication date.) Also there’s the overload that comes with National Poetry Month and the Stafford Challenge. Producing a poem a day becomes an obligation.

 

Then I take a Senior Studies Institute class with Alice Cotton, an artist and educator. She knows that creativity is fun. My drawings and collages from her classes are scattered around my study. It’s almost to the point that I need to cover a wall in cork so I can pin them up in one place.

 

When I take up colored pencils I enter beginner’s mind, a place where I don’t have to get it right. If the work turns out so badly that I won’t even display it in my study, it gets consigned to the role of backing on a scrapbook page.

 

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