November 2008 - Hechtman Ayers

The Centrifugal Eye

November 2008 - Hechtman Ayers

"In Varying Hues"

E.A. Hanninen - 2008

Lana Hechtman Ayers

Red Riding Hood Paints While the Wolf Sleeps
Shot with innumerable hues. ~ Sappho (Mary Barnard translation)

The way he's curled and faintly snoring
makes him seem more like an adorable cub
than a big bad Wolf.

I try not to make any noise
so as not to wake him as I move
to the easel,

take up a brush and start to paint
on the stretched canvas onto which
he's sketched

an image of me, lying naked in bed.
I start at the head and slowly
dot my hair with cobalt sky

with low-lying Payne’s gray clouds,
the Latin name for which he taught
me is nimbostratus.

For my eyes, I choose Hansa yellow opaque
to suggest willow leaves late, late spring
just before they weep.

On the flesh of my face and neck I streak
cadmium red, cinnabar, crimson, and position
a burnt sienna sunrise over my right cheek.

My breasts receive ultramarine violet,
my chest wall a chromium green,
my ribs the manganese of rivers and streams.

From my navel to pubis, I spread burnt umber,
Van Dyke brown, Venetian red, hues
of topsoil, humus, worm-deep earth.

My thighs to the curving length of my legs,
become a sea of Phthalo blue, cerulean, viridian,
every shade from calm to storm.

The bed itself, I swathe in carbon black, daub in
the silvery stars. I finish with ochre for the moon
lying on his back, snoozing next to the woman.

Setting aside the paintbrush, I step back to admire
how the renewed nude seems
to spring forth from the canvas, singing.

"Crystal Clear"

E.A. Hanninen - 2008

Lana Hechtman Ayers enjoys tuna sushi, gray days, and anything from the lips of Miles Davis. She is poetry editor of Crab Creek Review, publisher of Concrete Wolf Poetry Chapbooks and Late Blooms Poetry Postcards, and co-hosts a reading series in Redmond, WA.

Contact Lana
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"Poetry is a divination of the spiritual in the things of sense — which expresses itself in the things of sense, and in a delight of sense. Metaphysics also pursues a spiritual prey, but metaphysics is engaged in abstract knowledge, while poetry quickens art. Metaphysics snatches at the spiritual in an idea, by the most abstract intellection; poetry reaches it in the flesh, by the very point of the sense sharpened through intelligence."

~ Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry