Franklin & Dodds – February 2017

Colin Dodds and Linda Franklin traded art and words. Linda shared this image, entitled “Annie Above the Bed,” with Colin:

In response, Colin wrote this poem:

Annie Fannie at Morning’s Shore

From lolling dream debris
a perfidious fragment catches my eye back to day
The threshold gone before even cheat peeks
unveil the blue the curtains catch

A guardian waits at the boundary
where an object at rest becomes subject in motion

She is the opposite of that night-terror chest-sitter
A cat, in fact, blink napping against day’s dominion
huge with warmth, vibrating gently, soft
as afternoon sunlight through a clean window

Not sunlight, but daylight, catches my cheat peeks –
implacable as drafts in an old house
unscrubbable as corner shadows and impossible
as the distances of new-gone night
freshly resurrected as errand

The cat knows daylight’s gambits
She will not move until I do

* * * * *

Colin shared this poem with Linda:

To Have a Form is to Transform

In the plunder of the popes
a sphinx becomes a woman reclining
a Pharaonic man-within-a-man
becomes an Aramaic heart-within-a-man
a thorned and flaming heart becomes a road

Backing up, angels resolve to bull-skulls
resolve to the staves of Hermes on a train station
resolve to the crucifixion reaching and hanging all at once
resolves to the Sistine Chapel’s tree of knowledge
resolves to an angel resolves
outside the quarantine of the museum
to the fallopian temple complex
that shelters succors and dissolves the forceful story

Winged serpents pull a chariot to a slaughter of satyrs
past a goddess with seventeen breasts
whose lower half scatters in ornamental riot
friend to foxes and gryphons
scowling wife to a fool who worships
the house he just set on fire

The Medusa-stare of language
freezes each state we depart
The marble form on the gridded floor
shattered before the cross
the beheaded muse the boss bound with serpents
Mama Garibaldi on horseback pistol in her right hand
infant in her left, eyes dim and serene

Monsters and disreputable relations now safely slaughtered
in gigantomachies on sarcophagi and fireplaces
Only cherubs remain to do us real harm
Their satin ribbons strangle the sources of reality
and usher in the monstrosity of the merely human

On the fortress bridge a succession of angels
furnish the implements of torture and crucifixion
above dark avid men who sell toys and souvenirs
Not yet statues, we are left
to decipher all this and more

Beside a newsstand, a bent and bundled grandmother
smiles and points at the foot traffic
The whole world is coming to her
And after so many years, everyone is familiar!
Marble saints and tyrants all shed their heads and hands in time
Statuaries melt to fields of cloud
The ages’ membranes dissolve
It is traumatic for everyone but her

The sky itself
is an old friend come to visit—
all their quarrels resolved!

In response, Linda made this image, entitled “Transform”: