Shelved?

Not all the art I live with hangs on walls.

Much more is in books. Where it rests, 

waits, perhaps even lurks, until the time

I open it. Then it opens me. Some volumes

are thick, heavy, outsize … supersize.

O’Keeffe, Klimt, Warhol’s photography.

The heavy lifters.  Others are long and slim,

like my copy of The Tale of Genji. This is

the Yoshitaka Amano set of paintings.

The tales are told briefly, but each image –

delicate in line, sumptuous in colour –

is matched by words of poetry, of longing.

My son, who knows what I treasure, gave me 

this book (having held it dear on his own 

closest shelves) after he saw my haiku 

to mourn a lover of Genji: the Moonflower girl.

The book lies quiet, inert, secret. Secretive. 

Until, in time, there creeps once again 

a thread of moonlight to touch me: a soft hand,

a gentle whisper… Ah yes. Yes. Ahhh!

For my haiku to mourn a lover of Genji, see here.

NaPoWriMo resource and prompt: Today’s daily resource is the online exhibitions page of the International Folk Art Museum. I have a particular predilection for folk art, in which the strange and boisterous so often finds itself going hand-in-hand with practical objects of daily use. But the museum also showcases work of other sorts, like 100 Aspects of the Moon, a series of woodblock prints completed by the Japanese artist Taiso Yoshitoshi shortly before his death in 1892.    [One of these was of the character I've called the Moonflower girl, from The Tale of Genji. – RNW]

Last but not least, here’s today’s (optional) prompt. In her poem, “Living with a Painting,” Denise Levertov describes just that. And well, that’s a pretty universal experience, isn’t it? It’s the rare human structure – be it a bedroom, kitchen, dentist’s office, or classroom – that doesn’t have art on its walls, even if it’s only the photos on a calendar. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem about living with a piece of art.

The Poet Enters the Imagination of South Korea*

 

Where the wind mets the water

is a memory of trees, a discussion

of serenity. The Otherlands

are full of moving fruit,

like coloured balls played with

by children, and a tree lying down  

on a bed of clouds. Elsewhere 

there’s a green, leafy print

of a poem in French,

in its centre an open flower 

traced in lines of light.

I am the one who will come

and tell you of all these things.

I am who reminds you, ‘When you go, 

don't forget you carry back magic.'

*Viewing online images from South Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art

The first three lines of the poem appropriate titles of some of the exhibits.

NaPoWriMo Prompt: The poem is meant to answer, 'obliquely', the question of why I am a poet.

Bones in the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

Look, dearest Andrew! 

(with your beloved ghost eyes).

Look here!

The cow skull hangs on the wall,

nude as a new babe although 

not soft, not warm, not chubby.

No, it looks like an elongated face 

with tiny eyes and a huge open scream.

Turn it over and it still screams,

but the extra bones on the underside 

are ornate, like frilly trimmings. 

These eyes are high and slanted 

over pinpoint nostrils,

and the scream this side

is angry.  

The lateral view

has a long, thin nose

like a pointing finger

and teeth that hang 

like the fringe on a curtain.

Here, the eyes

are cavernous.

Their sightless gaze might dark-swallow

one who looks back.

But this is the bare skull.

Her paintings are phantasmagorical

in the vast book I bought 

– do you remember? –

in May 1999, in SanFran on Pier 39, 

where you’d dreamed of taking me

our only afternoon there, 

on a holiday weekend

so we couldn’t post it home

to Australia.

Between flights out, luggage already 

checked in and weighed, 

I slung it in a brand new cabin bag 

over my shoulder 

to re-board,

trying to to look as if it wasn’t 

weighing me down. 

Like smuggling something unauthorised

onto a space shuttle.

The book. Actual size a little larger than my laptop, 

14-and-a-half by 11 inches or 36-and-a-half by 28 cm..

View the museum exhibit here.

Written for NaPoWriMo 2025, Day Two.

Also shared (off-prompt) with Friday Writings #171 at Poets and Storytellers United.