Three sample poems from A Horse at the Hirshhorn, by
Eric A. Weil
Published October, 2002, by Finishing Line Press, Cincinnati, Ohio
A
Horse at the Hirshhorn
Large
brown canvas, white dots and lines, a few
Darker brown areas. The title card
says HORSE.
Think-pose; have I perceived some Essence of Horse
The
artist smeared in with his palette knife,
The ripple of muscles along a galloping flank,
The
rhythmic rise and fall of mane? At
first,
Nothing occurs; I consider memory, expectation,
The
ease of confusing a sequence of events:
Which did I do first, read card or view painting?
The
wide spot on this line could be a knee,
This feathery tuft of white, a fetlock. Look!
This
dark splotch near the bottom must be an eye.
Collecting parts into a whole, I feel satisfaction,
A
kinship with the artist and his arrangement . . .
Yet “HORSE” seems arbitrary, this horse leg
Could
be the proboscis of an anteater, the wing
Of a dead swan in mud. Which vision
to accept?
An
answer comes in overhearing, “Looks
like
A train wreck to me, what’s it called? Horse?
Okay.”
********
Clouds
After
dinner’s numbing silence,
she walks to the edge of town,
past windows blue with news,
blue
as her bruises.
Twilight on maple trunks
kindles quick visions
the
color of her suitcase
waiting in the closet;
a scrap of paper in the ditch
rustles
like a bus ticket;
how merely enduring
the chiseled paired stones appear.
The
clouds behind the trees
glow ruddy with wishes, and she
wishes a thousand-mile wind
rolling
off the dusty plain
would whistle through this town
where she will search
the
small dun cloud of her heart
for the lightness
that will let her float away.
******
Saving
Two Hundred Crabs
Walking
the shore, meeting place of life
and life, with the resulting detritus
of daily battles scattered about,
I watch a gull attack a crab
beneath a sky as blue as anyone
might desire for a last glimpse of this world.
Eye to eye, the gull feints a jab,
the
crab holds claws up like a basketball
player defending the lane. Black
eye
in a cocked, gray-feathered head, beak
a hooked blade, a lever, a quick flick
of the neck to click on the reddish shell
and the large claw hammering the beak.
Flipped, the crab lands cat-like,
extends
open pincers, still
as waiting traps, a dare. The
battleground,
the sand, the incessant wave-sound
and uncountable shells and pieces
of shells of clam and cochina
and crab and whelk. I approach
the stand-off, the bird flaps, gives ground.
Crouching,
I see it’s a she-crab,
her belly covered with eggs
in their slick jelly, eggs as black
as two hundred gulls’ eyes. Inclined
to walk a spectator’s distance
and let nature battle nature
for survival, Thoreau’s ants in mind,
I
relent, as random shell-bits
remind me of a news photo:
a human skull on its side in the mud
of Rwanda or Kosovo,
unidentifiable beyond
the certain suffering, and I keep
the gull away. But the she-crab
won’t go
into
the waves and safety. Despite
my shooing and splashing, she, armored knight
with upstretched sword and shield, defends
her innocent brood against me. That
mud-slick skull -- chosen from a crowd,
perhaps he saw a sky like this one
before the machete or the bullet,
perhaps
he died knowing some revenge:
his pregnant wife had crossed
the border. Finally, I pick up
a sandy disk of crabshell, debris
of an earlier seagull supper,
thrust it at the larger claw. She
clamps it and I carry her
to
the lapping water, where
she scuttles into the breakers, waving
her cousin’s carapace overhead,
I don’t know whether in thanks
or defiance, while the gull
glides above the foam, this failure
forgotten in the search for another meal.