Kathleen Goldbach
On the Garrigue in Southern France
Thyme grows wild and shrubby on the garrigue,
that rocky scrub of light and ruined bricks.
Our boots strike its stiffened, sun-dried sticks.
Its pungent smell, the shells (one time a league
or more beneath a sea), the shards are a dig
with tiers of buried years. My foot kicks
fossils of curled snails. A cricket clicks
in bits of villas fallen in fatigue.
Drilling a well, our friend dug up archaic
terra cotta handles and Roman tiles
like those in Musee Antique. We dine on snails
in wine, admire a recomposed mosaic:
a man's one laughing eye winks out through time,
disregarding the pieces lost in roots of thyme.
Solstice
Light comes less
and less.
All is ice
and loss.
Sol
reaches the slot
at Stonehenge site,
then stops, sits,
before it slices
back, a tic
that told the Celts.
Low, it sets
like a colt
over a stile.
Frost silts
windowpanes, ices
roads and roofs. Snow clots
ways. Darkness closets
all, closes
every eye. Sole
night reigns, slits
each flame with sleet, lists
the griefs of winter's costs
that first new sunrise stole.
Ghazal
Amber beetles neglected to adapt in time
to keep their feet out of sap and got trapped in time.
A baby is born with cheese on her head, blood on
her bottom, wrinkled and folded and wrapped in time.
Sing it gold, strum it blue, dance it hot, drum it cool,
hum it madly out of tune, but clap it in time.
If Niagara Falls began making a sea
of the Mississippi, could it be capped in time?
Hiking the pungent hills of the dry chaparral,
we stopped to drink wine in rosemary, napped in thyme.
Poetry and music—are they really the same?
Each have the eagerness to be rapped in time.
She bent over her drawing, whisper-breathed, moved her
magic marker deftly—hand, heartbeat, rapt, in time.
First the squeal, then the skid, then the slow-motion roll-
over. He saw his whole life reel by—strapped in time.
Kathleen or Kathy, which one to be, formal or
free? When will she ever choose which is apt? In time.
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| Megan Marlatt:Looking like large puppet heads, it was "anima", the root of "animation", that led me to the making of the big heads, (or "capgrossos" as they are called in Catalonia where I learned the craft.) Anima is the soul or what breathes life into a being and to animate an inanimate object, an artist must insert a little soul into it. However to bring attention to what is invisible, (the soul), I chose to mold its opposite in solid form: the persona, the ego, the big head, the mask. Nearly every culture across the globe has masks. They allow performers to climb into the skin of another being and witness the other's world from behind their eyes. While doing so, the mask erases all clues of the performer's age, gender, species or race. In this regard, I find them to be the most transformative and empathic of all human artifacts.
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