Collective Invention.
This is the first painting that I ever had.
Well, I had a very, very incredible experience
with this painting.
I looked at it years before I wrote this poem,
and it was during a time when I was very inarticulate.
And you get into those places where they're usually
dark places where you're trying to deal
with stuff in your life that's difficult
and it's just very, very hard to write about.
But, the paint-- this painting seemed
to speak very, very deeply to me.
And I somehow went inside that painting,
and I don't know how long I was there.
But, when I came out, I had been there and I wrote this--
I guess, I wrote this poem about three years
after that Collective Invention.
The picture in this case is a picture very simple
of an opposite of a mermaid, a female--
let's see, how does it go?
Yeah, a fish top and a female lower torso lying on the sand
with waves coming up, just very simple.
The marigolds of blue vinyl suitcase
have crud all over the stove.
He left shiniest to bring light to.
Yes, a shelf and reach where the little both of them
could begin, could make his clean start
as fresh as watermelon slice.
Oh, where was her life?
In him, his tiny mysteries, her laughing sound,
a light in his throat.
Oh, what was a mother to do being her
and suddenly it's now?
When she went away, there was this big boy who pushed him.
When she went away, they pushed him in the puddle.
He was running home.
And she wasn't there.
But trying somewhere else to find out who and where was she.
Was she not the neat and tidy?
Did she not see her seducers in a line
and shaking their fingers and showing, be here, be here.
In her mind, was it she lay at the edge of the waters?
At the edge of the waters?
Was it sand there?
Was her fish skin bare?
All she knows is it scratches.
And when the waves collapse in inches,
she cannot swim for her Phinney body's half human.
One day, she's plunk on the shore
and her image comes to her in a picture
as though, holding a mirror of blue paint,
just a whiff of Verizon and the little waves
creeping and folding.
And there it is, no way of turning her back now.
Her thighs, knees, soft as whirring of crotch hair
and all the color of how she ought to be.
But suddenly, those fins and the beginning
of silver slippery fish lady lying, no arms,
no woman swimming.
But a face cut deep with gills, and the sad eyes panting.
And the absolute quiet of something about to arrive.