Other Places,
Other Times
The Rape of Helen
There is a decorous backstory on an adjacent canvas.
A blonde Paris sits before three elaborately coiffed standing goddesses.
The four all look calm. There is no hint here of what this moment
Might be prelude to, to what the other, later, canvas might show.
And here it is, foregrounded, without any hint of evasion.
Paris in red tights and gold-colored cape and boots
Has lifted the more drably colored Helen off of her feet.
Her bosom tight against his chest, she gasps, red shoes kicking air.
In the background, a tidy ship with a golden sail and fittings
Waits to carry them from this place of monstrous action,
From the exuberance and passion that it alone has witnessed
To other shores and another story, turbulent in a different way.
The viewer is left to ponder whether or how to assign blame:
To the gods, to the humans, or to an enduring need for color in life.
After the Hurricane
We had the beaches.
No better beaches anywhere.
Never gonna be the same.
The hurricane came and sat awhile.
Winds tumbled everything upside down.
Brought the sea up into the town.
Now fields are full of splintered wood,
Piled rubble, and wrecked appliances.
Never gonna be the same.
People lost. Lives scattered.
Bodies bagged and in a van.
Can't know our pain.
Our town is gone.
Our lives are gone.
Never gonna be the same.
Seeing Blues
Dressed in short-sleeve blue work shirt and darker blue shorts
a scruffy man who looks like he has probably seen better days
lopes forward, his shanks an awkward inverted v, dragging
what looks like a stripped tree branch that is taller than him.
With a tattered American flag fastened near its top, he keeps
this makeshift pole upright beside him. A breeze bellies the flag's
upper blue ground and its white stars out above his right shoulder,
but in the area below the red and white stripes are merest shreds.
Like the man, the space he walks through looks disordered.
Above, puffy white clouds hang framed with varied shades of blue.
Behind him, on the left, a blue frame house with white eaves
leans left as it sinks slowly down into the Choupique Bayou.
This poem, a concerned witness, wants him to be someplace else soon.
Somewhere life is good, the winds are calm, and hurricanes never come.