SELF-PORTRAITS

My features, voices, amplified, floating.
The nose, a phallus at rest. Around the bend
of brow, another brow forms a cliff.    

Primitive circles, my eyes
stalk afternoon shadows.

Barbed wire beard;
demonic lines scratch at my cheek.

Seen through the paper,
absence retains its form.

 

THE VICARAGE GARDEN

 

Wind agitates the pencil lines, 

the fragile web

connecting my family:

 

Reverend Theodorus

Anna Cerbentus

 

Anna Cornelia

Elisabeth Huberta

Willemien Jacoba

Cornelis

 

Vincent Willem.

Named for Mother’s

stillborn son,

I draw a nest

in the wound of the bark.

 

My pen blackens the pollard roots.

Younger brother, Theo,

pays for the ink.

 

 

SORROW

 

            …most important is not to deceive or desert a woman… when she has fallen down.

 

 

 

My carpenter pencil draws

Sien as Mary Magdalen,

the paper receiving the void

between the rock and her thigh,

her lumbering breasts.

 

She sits for so long,

the sun goes down over the river.

 

If she were forgiven

what she did for bread;

her back bent over

from carrying the cross,

instead of a child,

she would not be invisible.

 

Light caresses her long hair

tangled into brambles.

At the foot of love’s mean grave

I will scatter lilies of the valley.