More Ekphrastic Poems by Lytton Bell

Transient Poet Leaving Home
William Allen, 1986

Transient Poet Decides to Stay

Despite the Burning

This poet will need inspiration

One match and an addiction will not

suffice in the face of the storm

the house where he grew up ablaze

(arson eminently suspected)

the continuing lectures of his parents

This poet needs to eat

He needs to feel the first fat drops of rain

plunk down onto his upturned smile

He needs to see the lightning split

the telephone pole in two

the charred halves falling a-

way from one another

into the poplar trees

This poet needs clothes

a stick of deodorant

a roadmap and an invitation

to your house for tea

He needs these

if he is going to stay

if he is going to feel at home

in his own shoes

if he is going to write it all down

inhale it like that first sweet fog of nicotine

pulsing hard behind the eyes

until the ordinary evening

ignites

suddenly

with a flicker, a sizzle and a rising plume

of smoke

casting the poet into stark silhouette

the lone, shadowy figure bridging

the darkness behind him and the

suit of words and light he buttons

snug around the mantra of his bones

Posing for Rodin

A flutter, a flicker

Naiad, Auguste Rodin, 1893

Meaning flows

from fingers of falling light

He does not tell me to stand still

He does not carve stasis

Even the marble slabs breathe here

Inflating with gasps of air

We both feel them pulling at our flesh

My pulse throbs in stone

Is this the thing we call life?

This vain attempt to fill

what can never be filled or full?

This grasp

so desperate to keep

all that it touches?

Let the lines and curves of my back

reveal my story to the world

My numb defeat, my face down in the water

Time would digest me whole

The cruel current whispers:

Life is flowing away from us!

Do we let ourselves be filled?

Our own

defenseless departure?

Or are we always left behind

while all that we love slips past

like driftwood?

This moisture clings hot, intimate

Lithe frailty of history, pliant celestial grace

Life and death are corporeal, insatiable

The sculptor exhales his vision

restless vapor of gratitude

confusing motion with progress

Garden of the Asylum at Saint-Remy 

Vincent Van Gogh, 1889

Tree in the Garden of the Insane Asylum at St. Remy

In his painting, it leans into the foreground

dark, foreboding

lush on the side facing an insurmountable wall

and distant low hills

amputated

on the side nearest the hospital windows

The amputated limb leers out

ghastly and more alive than anything else in the painting

including the shadowy, faceless figures

strolling innocently along the path beneath

a yellowish, trembling sky, thick with shifting clouds

Life is an exquisite anguish, the tree seems to say

I endure because I have no choice

I am rooted, transfixed by the beauty of even

my unendurable pain

because I feel it so vividly

And because I am a part of something here that is

bigger than just me -

some tableau

that requires me in its ever-

changing choreography

I push out the greenest leaves

where I still have branches

while a dark sap bleeds from my amputated stump

welling up from the injury again and again before

spilling down my trunk

painters and poets
ekphrastic