Fertility

A new painting came to live with me yesterday. As Sophia said, time to get the winter painting out and get something green in the room. She walked it across the commons in the morning and we set it up on the desk in my bedroom. We’ve had such a cold stretch of weather, so even though there is a lot of green, it was raw and cold– and Sophia was trying to get ahead of the sleet. Luckily, the white pine in my window is nice and green.

The commons looked quite different from when Annie and Sophia walked “February” over six weeks ago. That was a day when we still hoped for an early spring. The prairie surrounded them. Last week it was burned to make way for new growth this season. You never know when the wind will be right and the burn will happen.

The whole thing is rich with meaning. Burning to make way for new growth. My skin and sinuses have been burning lately. The chemotherapy is burning the cancer out as well. Occasional hot flashes. Controlled burn indeed.

These paintings have such a strong effect on me– Sophia was barely out of the house, and despite it being a tough day of recovery, I could almost hear my creative synapses firing. And so, a poem…

“May” by Sophia Heymans: http://sophiaheymans.com
acrylic, string, cut up socks, tree seeds, oil on canvas. 48″ x 60″. 2014

Fertility

after “May,” a painting by Sophia Heymans

From the shape of the patch I say
it is a wetland, round and marshy
and verdant at the edges,
floppy stands of sedge
firework trails of last year’s growth
scored into the canvas.

From the trees I say it aspires
to be an oak savannah,
rooted and long-standing,
wise and showing off its age,
upper branches a roost for hawks
though not quite yet.

The border tells a different story:
rows upon cultivated rows,
brown and clean and waiting
for the dark sky to drop its rain,
and reaching in, bottom right,
a row of bright green new leaves.

But it is the laundry that tells me
about the freshness of the sky
and the warmth of the sun,
and it is the curve of her belly
that tells me about this ripe season
and all the life that is to come.