The Garden of Verse: A Ragged Harp Player, A Poetess with Butterfly Wings, a Vision Doing Dishes, and Other Portraits in Verse

    

           A classic form of visual art, the portrait helps us to see -- and to appreciate. Portraits in words can do the same. 
           Among the fine offerings in the September issue of Verse-Virtual, an elegant "ekphrastic" poem -- the term used for poems that respond to pictures -- by Steve Klepetar illuminates the truth of the image. His poem "The Harp Player" matches the style of its minimalist subject -- the image of a haggard, but devoted figure pursuing an ethereal art -- with the well chosen words of his 14 short lines.
"Someone has pulled him
from oblivion with a few
hard lines, rendered
his black, choppy hair
and bristly beard, eyes
pressed shut, open
mouth..."
And someone has rescued a remarkable work of art
with a few well-wrought lines of verse.

          The portrait of a legendary poet emerges from John Stanizzi's "Looking Out Emily's Window," a poem written in a shapely appropriation of Emily Dickinson's hymn-stanza style. Following Dickinson's own poem comparing a butterfly's emergence from a cocoon to a "Lady from her Door," Stanizzi's poem suggests the spiritual arrival of the poet "dressed in cabbage White -- Lilting wings of tulle."
           The Cabbage White is perhaps the most common of butterflies. After reading this poem I'll look at them more carefully in the future and try to catch a glimpse of tulle.

           And yet another sort of portraiture, the capture of a precious moment, shines in Joe Cottonwood's charming "That Summer," a poem that depicts the beginning of something special at summer camp. The language is all of a piece here, from "the triple sink," the washing of 93 soup bowls ("she counts, you learn"), to the poem's reference to "Pop's wheezer Chevy truck,"' and the youthful dishwasher's hair as "a swirl on top," as the little drama proceeds to the denouement:
"She reaches in rubber gloves for a can
of Comet cleanser on a shelf over the sink
(stretching, exposing belly, unaware)
when she sees you and tries to push
the straggle of hair from her face
leaving little bubbles among the freckles."
             Take the photograph right there. It's in the can.

             Penny Harter's poem gives us, as the title promises, "two spiders." I don't like spiders, but I like the poem's perfect depiction of them as "black condensations/
at the seam of wall and ceiling," The poem shows us the possible scenarios for such creatures -- mating, fighting, becoming victims of human disgust -- yet spares them as bit-part players in a bigger picture:
"satellites
circling the center, living
to catch what they can
and devour it
one night at a time,
one day."

              In Alan Walowitz's "Video Postcard from Vietnam," a poem deconstructing a vacation scene, we're given references to "in country," the rainy season, Hue, water buffalo, and "an ancient French garden" -- phrases and terms we might remember reading back when that country was synonymous with a long, pointless, hideous war inflicted by a 'great' country on a small one.
             But just as a 'video postcard' freezes a moment in time, the poem interprets this moment to make a larger statement, offering memorable words and wider meaning to a lovely and remarkable image:
"The odd, unspoken message says,
Here is a place we feel safe.
Their fingers barely touch across
the distance between them, the width of the deck,
as they try their best to make a heart of their hands."


             You can see the photo and read the words to this and the many other fine poems in the September 2018 issue of Verse-Virtual at 
http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html