RACHEL OF ARLES
I begin,
Vincent, to regard your
closeness
in matched colors: stormy
sky
blue eyes, the orange of
your beard.
Some days you entered
full of sunflowers, those
big ugly eyes
that watched while walls
had ears
for the wild side.
Your head
not yet a hill of
bandages,
you saw how Rachels often
end up empty
and whispered about a
wedding of two
complementary colors.
And I half-
hearing you rave late
into night
about the fullness of
color: how grays glow
with a bridelike blush
and yellow in woodwork
wavers out and into
shadows.
With your scent
of turpentine, absinthe
and death, you gave me
more than I bargained
for. The Christmas
you brought me the
razored section
of your left ear, I
turned away,
not wanting to see what
wasn’t there.
-- Lenny Lianne
This poem of mine is
almost thirty years old. Though it’s
gone through many revisions, the poem always has been spoken by Rachel.
Who was Rachel? According
to the brief police report printed in the Arles newspaper the day after Vincent
van Gogh cut off part of his earlobe, he gave the section of ear to a certain
Rachel, a prostitute.
Vincent cut off part of
his ear on Christmas Eve and gave it to Rachel as a token of himself, or
perhaps as a Christmas present.
How did I come to
write this poem? When I lived in Northern Virginia, and before
I started taking courses toward in MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry), I often
took courses at the Washington Writers Center, now in Bethesda, Maryland. One of those brief courses was “Nothing but
Words,” taught by Rod Jellema, a fine poet and teacher. One evening he gave a six-minute writing
exercise whose instructions were:
1.
Write in the
present tense.
2.
Use concrete,
specific words; no abstractions
3.
Try to use
all of these words:
mouth
ache
(as a verb)
star
pin
strip
(as a verb)
hill
trouble.
After six minutes of
writing, I had the first draft of the poem which, twenty-five years and quite a
few revisions later, would appear in my second book, FRENZY OF COLOR, REVERIE OF LINE.
Click here to go to Amazon and see my book.
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Click here to go to Amazon and see my book.
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1 comment:
the poem is breathtaking!
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