Steve Klepetar’s work has appeared in such
journals as Glass, Stirring, Red River
Review, Snakeskin, Black Market Lit and
many others. Several of his poems have been nominated for the Pushcart
Prize and Best of the Net. His most recent collections include Speaking
to the Field Mice (Sweatshoppe Publications, 2013), My Son Writes a Report on
the Warsaw Ghetto (Flutter Press, 2013) and Return of the Bride of Frankenstein
(forthcoming from Kind of a Hurricane Press). Klepetar teaches English literature at Saint Cloud State University in Minnesota. Read more on his website here |
| The White House at Night, 1890 |
Black Cat Women
After Van Gogh, The White House at Night, 1890
Black cat women on a village street, strolling
their great hips rolling, like they've forgotten
last night when they leaped lean on jagged fences
screeching with toms in the yellow moonlight.
Wakened to a feathery, tropical town, yellow-green
parrot hot, jasmine smelly with sun bouncing
white
off red-roofed stucco walls, they meander baking
stones. Their green eyes ache, squinting in
blades
of light. Today, squeezed tight into
blue-green
bodices, ink black skirts, kerchiefs cover silky
wild hair tamed in tight coils, knot-topped on
heads
swaying slightly up leering yellow stairs,
lurching
the high street ablaze with spiky trees, stabbing
traps of shrub and neon-bright bush. This
life a day
light dream, nothing but glinting interlude
before
sun sets, and black cats yowl in the colorless
cool.
House
With Blue Roof
 |
| House with Blue Roof, 1890 |
"Are there minds and interiors
of homes more important than
anything that has been expressed
by painting? I am inclined to think so."
Van Gogh
Problem
of color, of blue
and
streaks of white like the bone
beneath.
Of dark green and pale
translucent
green, liquid
as
the eyes of cats.
Inside,
the rooms are dark and cool.
Wood
and wicker chairs, the floors
rubbed
bare. On the table, fruit
and
wine, flowers, cheese and bread.
Come,
take the knife, cut yourself
a
thick slice, sip the fragrant wine,
rough
and new as what you drink at home.
Getting Calm
 |
| Saint-Paul Asylum, Saint-Remy, 1889-90 |
"I must not think of all that - I must
make things, even if it's only studies
of cabbages and salad, to get calm..."
Van Gogh
1.
The vestibule arches calm and solid,
ceiling space of Romanesque vaults,
brass ponderous as quiet afternoon.
Through open doors green day stabs
across the dried blood asylum floor,
a little rectangle of world.
This hallway is my mind, calm as arches
hunched to hold fingerprints
of sun. Inside I count my breaths,
heavy and even, my pulse
splashing as I tally shadows,
black-stroke strong.
2.
Madmen calm sometimes, creating quiet
spaces between wild emotions of eye,
effort seldom seen. I must not think
of screaming faces in the Cyprus trees,
heaving lines of earth, grass and hill.
Crows rise like black checks of misery
to the seeping ink of night sky. Corn
burns, a fire of gold, but I must make
myself calm, painting salad in my quiet
room, finding design in veins of lettuce
leaf, true colors at the blend
of carrot, onion, chard.
3.
Tonight calmness will pervade
my dreams, gray rain on dark fields.
Mud sucks at my boots, blue
mountains seem to rise, like heaving
backs of earth. I walk through wet
crops, peasant-faced, the weasel
of Saint-Remy. I walk calmly
in the mode of love, offering what
I can: sweet young green of almond
bursting blossoms white as wedding
veils, rough-barked trunks of trees,
uneasy calm between the crows and storm.
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