Painting Grandma

Painting Grandma

Bean tendrils curl like memories, twisting from the tip

of my brush onto the canvas before me.   Clipped crookedly

to the easel, small, bent and dark, an old sepia photo

calls memories of my grandmother into this distant studio.

To delight her only granddaughter, she let skin form

on my farina the way I liked it, brewed strong coffee for me

at an age when my parents called me “tender” and “too young,”

sweetened it with cream and sugar (and sometimes chocolate),

warmed me on winter afternoons with hugs and homemade soup,

baked cookies for me with sweet surprises hidden inside. 

And her garden I remember, and her in it. As she bent

to pluck peas or pull weeds, bulges of flesh and rolls

of stocking tops showed below the hems of her slips and skirts. 

I loved the neat perfection of that garden with its black, glittery soil.

Its bounty filled her pots and pans, her table, and our bellies.

The dark little photo invades my painting.  Brushed in first,

tumbles of white cotton candy ride brown, flat-bottomed barges

across a brown sea of sky.  I borrowed them from the photo,

too resonant in brown to paint in blue.  Tall beans wind

around rows of poles and pile on one another over mounds

of clouds, their leaves sepia brown on the bottoms and greening

gradually toward the top.  I paint the photo’s dark woman

secure between the rows, round as a snowman in this unlikely

season. Her grey braids I paint wrapped thin around her head,

like a shining tiara, her square face a tea-stained brown, leathery

and wrinkled as shed layers of sycamore bark. 

As the old photo revives my memories, Grandma

becomes the brightest point in the painting. I paint her bib apron

pink with red flowers over a frayed blue gingham housedress.

She reaches heavy brown arms to pluck green beans from plants

I paint in greens and golds before her.  The tips of their leaves overlap

her reproachful face.  I remember the smile that stern face

always turned toward me and I smile in return toward the small scowl

I paint on her lips and forehead.   “Don’t,” she warns my father,

“point that camera at me.” Through the shining, iridescent lens

in my father’s hands, through more than fifty years of silence,

my grandmother cannot see the granddaughter who with a brush

traces the sun-edged clouds, suggests the light in her eyes,

and defines her bean-burgeoning apron, nor see, beyond me,

the great granddaughters and great, great granddaughters

who across five generations touch her still-damp face with their smiles.

Mary Stebbins Taitt

for Nicolina deNigri Ciaranello

This poem was published in the Paterson Literary Review #39, 2011-2012

A Jungle of Light

A Jungle of Light

As he is dying, my father furiously

paints.  Instead of the small invisible strokes

he used earlier, precise as a photo, he splashes

light on the canvas with a wide brush,

bold and bright.

When he looks inside, he says, all is darkness

and vultures circling.  But beside him,

still wet, a painted phoenix

circles the sun.  It pulses with brilliance,

yellows, oranges, and reds.

Crouched over his easel, he paints

the sunroom he'd always wanted

but never had.  Looks out from a jungle of light

and leaf to a succession of mountains gold on gold

on gold in the setting sun.

When he can't stand any more, he sits,

and when he can't sit, he paints lying

curled on his side.  Water lilies, in another new painting,

each flame white, green and gold.  Light defines

the leaves and liberates the water. 

He paints a self-portrait, a bit of ink blue,

black, purple and plum.  Drenching him with light,

a sun rises inside his heart.  An absence of paint

creates the light.  And the paint is absent;

it's missing, more and more.

Mary StebbinsTaitt

This poem was nominated for a Pushcart.

In Murky Waters

In Murky Waters

Already her pink toes disappear into the small shadowed pond

That serves as a gateway to the underworld.  The sun sets

Due west, relentless, as she plunges deep into clouded

Waters, swims strong, and surfaces

In another world.  It’s not what you’d expect, dark

Damp rock, stalactites and stalagmites, clusters of bats,

Dangling spiders.  Here, dark things coexist with an improbable

Profusion of sunshine:  dunes, jungles, mountains, waterfalls,

Fecund green swamps.  Anything found in the above-world exists

Below.  That first time, Persephone saw only darkness,

The fire-lit throne room, the endless files of dead

Passing through, the grey river Styx and the huge grey swamps

Through which it flows.  Hades had to teach her.  She opened

Her eyes to find other eyelids underneath.  Hades, who spoke at length

About the “veils,” peeled away onion layers of Persephone’s eyes

Until a pale yellow-green light began to suffuse the endless

Night.  Layer upon layer he scraped away, until Persephone herself

Began clawing the masks of blindness from her eyes,

Like Dante, tearing off his masks.  After months

Of thinning, the sun appeared within rock and beyond rock. 

“Ah, sweet sun,” She said to Demeter, one spring evening, pointing

Down through stone into her husband’s chambers.  Demeter imagined

Her daughter weak from lack of sustenance, from drinking

Only grenadine for half the year.  At first, Persephone swore she would rewrite

Her own myth:  escape from Hades and return to the flowering earth.

Now, rewriting again, she sees herself as uniquely privileged, golden

Fish in murky waters, the powerful, winged and shining

Queen of the underworld.

By Mary Stebbins Taitt.

This poem won first place at New Millennium and was published by them.

Counting Fingers Again

Because she’s sure the wolves have taken some, Geraldine

has started counting fingers.  She’s not sure how many she had

before.  She thinks they may have taken a nose, a breast or some

of her toes.  But mostly, her fingers worry her.  They look lumpy

and uneven, leftovers the wolves rejected.  She has fed the wolves

ice cream and donuts.  Slipped out with steak and chicken, hands full

of scrambled eggs.  Sometimes their long tongues and sharp teeth

wrap around her fingers, but always, they seem to let go and try again

lunging for the treats she offers them.  A nip here, a bite there. One,

she says, two.  Three.  She starts again.  One.  The wolf pack forms

around her, sweeps her out into the darkness with them. Tonight, she

has frosted sugar cookies.  With sprinkles.  Her pockets are full of them.

by Mary Stebbins Taitt

Published in eDificewRecked

Edge of Glass

My mother bites the edge of fine blown glass,

crunches fragments in her teeth and swallows them.

Cool, smooth and delicate.  Like dangerous ribbon candy.

She is a small, thin child, sepia-skinned, dark

hollow eyes with reflections of long-dead faces.

She scuffs her knees roller-skating, metal skates

on bumpy sidewalks from home to Grandmother's.

Yesterday, a match fell into the wastebasket.

The kitchen went up in flames.

She turns a Tootsie-Roll in her mouth as she skates,

chocolate honey-syrup darkens her tongue.

Sometimes, there is a large, strange bow at her throat

or perched on her head. Her dress is polka-dotted,

gingham, flowered, devoid of color.

Other times, the skate key bangs on a cord

No one seems to notice as she grows smaller

and smaller. Fades. Wrinkles around the edges.

Tonight, she turns another glass in her teeth.

Half a house burns from her dreams.

Tomorrow, she may disappear entirely.

Mary Stebbins Taitt

published in The Women Artist's Datebook

A Visit with Van Gogh

A Visit with Van Gogh

I walk through broad strokes of sun,

wheat bent over, women carrying

bundled sheaves, trees dark

in the distance.  At the edge

of the field, he sits, crumpled,

still, and filled with light.  I sit

beside him, look out over the late

afternoon, over the stubbled fields,

the roughened skin of soil. 

In his dark wild eyes,

for one moment, I see galaxies

colliding, shining cities of darkness

crumbling.  His gaze returns

to his palette, to the field beyond

his work.  I finger an obsidian chip,

feel the edge of its glassy smoothness,

the darkness of his implosion.  A black hole

flowers at the center of his soul.

The bottom of my sleeve, the hem

of my dress, my hair blow toward him.

A great light radiates from his darkness,

illuminates the coming night.

              ~
by Mary Stebbins Taitt
published in Montserrat Review

Marie Rivet has translated this to French, which you can view here.

Into the Current

Into the Current

We hid mountains under the sheets, a rising core

of flowered Appalachians. You thrust me into the shapes

of krumholtz. Fairy forests at the edge of rock, trees twisted

into storm. Cougar on granite; eager feasting at the warm flesh

of a doe. We hid the wind, the sudden first warm day of April,

snow still in the shadows of the oaks. Heat drove us

from our cave onto the rocks above the precipice. We tumbled, plummeted

into the gorge. Colliding in air, we crashed to the water.

Into the current, over the falls, into the pool. A sudden mountain

pool. Lit by trilliums and bloodroot. Coo

of a mourning dove. The first white-throated sparrow sings. Flies from

under the sheets smack into the still-closed window.

Crumples, chest fluttering, to lie stunned on the bedroom floor.

Mary Stebbins Taitt

(this poem appears in the Feb/March issue of edificeWRECKED, I'm unsure of the year --2005, I think)