Lenox & Demond – May 2018

Marlayna Demond and Kelly Lenox traded art and words. Marlayna shared this image, entitled “Salt Stains,” with Kelly:

In response, Kelly wrote this poem:

Old Pond

Pollen films the surface,
flattens ripples each time

frog jumps in. Chorus
frogs beat wet air,

raucous as jungle birds.
Their calls crescendo,

crowd into a Milky Way
of clustered remnant light.

Bright and dim, stars
string a pulsing line

across this score of
backyard music.

Frog jumps in. The pond—
anoxic, nearly—

still alive enough
to keep the bullfrog croaking.

* * * * *

Kelly shared this poem with Marlayna:

Below Shakespeare Arch

The lizard’s tongue is forked, dry as juniper twigs
on the dead part of this tree, which shades a wash
still damp from last week’s rain. The canyon road
is impassable for all but high-clearance four-by’s—
the kind that dig gullies deeper but can get you
into this corner of Utah pulled from the market
to preserve petroglyphs and cliffsides.

Red sandstone, white limestone, and sky paint
a flag that could grace this land’s page in the atlas,
if those volumes hadn’t gone the way of octave
and quarto. Shakespeare never saw such
hoodoos and tarantula-speckled vastness.
Shag bark grays under sun so hot the wood pops.
Seeds rattle when wind stirs brown stalks.

In response, Marlayna made this image, entitled “Cracked”: