after Helen Frankenthaler's Mountains and Sea (1952)

 

Splashes of blue, periwinkle and cobalt

wings lifting the image, bottom

to top, and green, sage

of the New Mexico desert,

early spring mountains in West Virginia

 

and red -- apples, blood, lipstick

on a tissue, rubber boots for winters

long gone.  Rising through the whirlwind,

wind-whipped color, fabric swatches,

a diaphanous shape, ghost

of a memory:  my mother, most

of whose years were spent in mountains

with ice on winter roads, but who longed for

the ocean, waves repeating their coming

and going, curl and foam, and she out beyond

 

the breakers, side stroking, white bathing cap

blooming a blue dahlia, swimming back and forth,

and I'm a child on the shore (see sand dumped

on the paint?) watching, loving the bright suits

of the women, all-day sucker swirls of beach

 

umbrellas, even my sunburn (see splotches

of pink?) not thinking at all about waves

of pine, white caps of snow, the path (see

it curving, right to upper left?) that I follow

into the woods, into the future.  And the past.

 

 

 

Anita Skeen is currently Professor Emerita in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University where she was the Founding Director of The RCAH Center for Poetry at MSU and is the Series Editor for Wheelbarrow Books.  She has been the Coordinator of the Creative Arts Program at Ghost Ranch for 41 years, and the Fall Writing Festival for 23 years.

She is the author of six volumes of poetry: Each Hand A Map (1986); Portraits (1990); Outside the Fold, Outside the Frame (1999); The Resurrection of the Animals (2002); Never the Whole Story (2011); When We Say Shelter (2007), with Oklahoma poet Jane Taylor; and The Unauthorized Audubon (2014), a collection of poems about imaginary birds accompanied by the linocuts of anthropologist/visual artist Laura B. DeLind.. With Taylor, she co-edited the literary anthology Once Upon A Place: Writings from Ghost Ranch (2008). Her poetry, short fiction, and essays have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. Collaboration is an important aspect of her work and she currently involved in writing projects with poets Jane Taylor and Cindy Hunter Morgan, and visual artist Laura DeLind.