Portrait of Myself, Preparatory Study for the Large Illusionistic Ceiling Fresco
If you take a brown feather, if you line it just a tiny bit with black, if you look underneath the feather, if you look at me closely in the light, the chased, encasing air, the leaf from which the subject seems to grow, flowering in catkins, the fruit a small samara no man would have, you would never display so much emotion in a portrait, ever title this portrait of a woman: My Life as a Lark. As though it’s snowing leaves, she’s a flurry of shadow cast by green, or by clouds as she dampens the ground with her sadness, then rehearses a trill that obsesses as written. As performed, she’s part of the air behind: her eyes blend, her shrug dissolves with the color of background sprig of flowering almond blossoming in a glass, with marked breast & throat: desperate heart heat dance. Chromatic, the almond body, when you’re painting each stroke as if you’re naming it, like writing which is naming, bringing into being, we who are making our worlds in self-portraits. As the Lady of the Lark emerges out of painting, a fading effect of becoming thickness creates folds, then draws strong black lines around them—the bodies the portraits the trees—except the almonds raining—
I Spent a Day
driving up the coast w/the top down recording voice notes on my iphone thoughts about what was going on eight hours of thoughts & then I accidentally erased them sometimes I was crying sometimes I felt sickened there were moments when I thought I’d hit upon a truth I couldn’t help but admit it terrified me I didn’t want it it’s astonishing the amount of withholding & what for most of what can happen already has so what’s a few more toothmarks I thought you don’t know what I’m thinking because I haven’t said do I actually know how the story ends unless I’m mistaken it ends in death unless I’m mistaken yours does also unless you’re more godish than you would grant yourself dear heathen do not autocorrect that word godish do not although my Eric a-c’d as Eros that error I like yet our eros story & yours & everyone’s every story ends but people set deadlines to get things going to get things done before they’re dead them or the thing it’s an arbitrary clock an arbitrary clock I’ve set which is why I’m presently present I keep that in mind in no hurry to rush forward the migratory transit of transient feelings how we wear who we are in this moment the past is a path of inedible crumbs the future I can’t imagine a future indelible or foreseeable or at all actually looking back in retrospect I’ve always been wrong stop looping back right now right now meanwhile glancing down note my itchy foot pressing the pedal & gazing ahead my unimaginable What & looking aside Askance my dear & constant companion my shouldertap whose notes to self I accidentally erased wouldn’t you think if they were so important that I’d have remembered
—
Dale Going is a poet and printer living with disability in New York. She has published the poetry collections The View They Arrange (Kelsey Street Press, 1995) and As/of the Whole (winner of the SFSU Poetry Chapbook Award, selected by Brenda Hillman, 1990) as well as numerous chapbooks, broadsides, and artists’ books. Her work has received support from the Fund for Poetry, California Arts Council, Yaddo, and Djerassi Fellowships. Her Em Press letterpress editions of poetry by women are archived internationally in prominent library special collections. She co-founded the quarterly ROOMS, which for a decade published formally innovative work of women writers and artists. New work appears or is forthcoming in VOLT, New American Writing, Blood Orange Review, Banyan Review, Equinox, Griffel, LandLocked, Milk Press, Nelligan Review, Stone Canoe, Tiger Moth Review, Under a Warm Green Linden, Wild Roof Journal, and the exhibition catalog of Ars poetica at the BRAHM Museum in Blowing Rock, NC. She was a finalist for the Gasher Press 2024 Chapbook Poetry Prize and has a chapbook forthcoming from Albion Books.