Poems that Inspired my Art

Sun­day Evening—-April 14, 1991

 

He fights me—

Our long-haired sil­ver cat

Whose tail is like

A plume of smoke.

All evening I’ve been brushing

The mat­ted fur from

His chest and belly,

Try­ing to extricate

The clumped hair with gentle

Strokes, but now I give

A hard tug and his claws

Catch my fingers

In retal­i­a­tion. His teeth

Find the side of my hand,

I drop the brush,

Pull back my arm,

And curse the cat

Under my breath.

 

On tele­vi­sion

Our coun­try is glorifying

War, cel­e­brat­ing the slaughter

Of a hun­dred thousand

peo­ple. Between commercials

For Chrysler and AT&T

We salute, parade tanks, wave

Flags, and sing about

Our love of freedom,

As if that had

Some­thing to do with

What we did.

 

The cat jumps on my lap, ready for battle

Again, I apply the brush

To pull at another

Small knot of gray fur

And cry out as he shreds

The skin of one knuckle,

Leav­ing it bleed­ing and raw.

 

Bob Hope, Ronald Reagan,

Gen­eral Pow­ell, Pres­i­dent Bush—

They are all there—

Smil­ing, wav­ing, cheering.

For almost two hours now

Hol­ly­wood patriots

Have filled the screen

With exul­ta­tion

Over our great victory,

Extolling the won­ders of war—

Mod­ern remote-control war,

New World Order kick-ass war—

And for almost two hours now

The only blood I’ve seen

is on my bony hand.

by Carla Chlouber

 

Value of Know­ing My Place (Piece enti­tled “In my Heart”)

 

I have come to believe

that it is very important

to know my place,

which is a patch

of the Cross Timbers,

a part of Okla­homa where the hills

are cov­ered with cedars

and oaks, split by streams

flow­ing from springs

at the base of sandstone

ridges, wild plum and redbud

bloom­ing in March

while the bright green winter

grass still carpets

the for­est floor.

 

Except that I never

call it a for­est. I say

the woods, and the other day

a neigh­bor looking

for his Bar­ba­dos sheep

called it the brush, which

is what Wash­ing­ton Irving

saw on his way to the prairie—

an impen­e­tra­ble tangle

of veg­e­ta­tion, the continent’s

last valiant effort

before giv­ing in

to the tree­less plains

of the West.

 

The Cross Tim­bers. The words

sing in my heart, because now

I know how to say

what kind of land it is

that has always called me back,

because as a child

I was enthralled by the caves,

Canyons and brambles

Of the magic woods.

Because now I know

How the spirit can endure

And how impor­tant it is

That I know my place.

 by Carla Chlouber

 

Fire­walk­ing

 

“The fire­walk is a metaphor for life.”*

 

Appar­ently the trick is not to look down.

You can walk across coals

Hot enough to melt an engine block,

Feel­ing only cool, wet grass

On the soles of your bare feet.

Those who look have been burned.

You must walk briskly,

Head level and eyes up.

 

You are think­ing now that life

Is a metaphor for firewalking.

You must go on, no matter

How dif­fi­cult it is,

And you must not think

Of the pain.

 

But you are wrong.

At some time, per­haps very late

Some hot sum­mer night,

Or early some morning

When you can­not sleep,

When the air is still

And you can hear a car door

Slam, a toi­let flush, the neighbor’s dog

Bark­ing again,

You will remem­ber every firewalk,

And you will look down

And feel the flames.

 

*From a news­pa­per report on the art of firewalking

by Carla Chlouber

 

The Impov­er­ished Land­scape Painter Reflects on His Art (Piece enti­tled “Ele­phants Prance”

 

I tend to fall in love with my mistakes.

I frame them care­fully and hang them on the wall,

Admir­ing all their infelicities.

What beauty I find in the acci­den­tal fall

Of virid­ian on a field of yel­low wheat,

The col­ors flow­ing on the sky by chance.

And in the back­ground I dis­cover flow­ers, trees,

A water­fall, and danc­ing elephants.

I delight in the unfore­seen, the happenstance,

The incon­gruities of things! And most of all

I am enthralled by the yel­low clouds, the soft green sky,

And the won­der­ful way the ele­phants prance.

 by Carla Chlouber

 

Codetalk­ers

 

Years ago our Navajo friend Hos­teen Tsiniginni

Told us of how he con­founded the enemy

Using a lan­guage unwritten,

Unknow beyond the deserts of his home–

Words famil­iar only to the wind

That twists around the branches of the pinons

On the plateaus, sweeps into the canyons,

And rushes to the sacred mountaintops,

Leav­ing noth­ing on the air

But whoosh and ssss

And soft gut­teral words

Fol­lowed by short puffs of warm sound.

It was the one code that

Could not be broken.

 

It appears now that we are code talk­ers, too,

With our­selves as the enemy,

Using words to con­fuse and distract,

To mask the mean­ing of what we say

So that syl­la­bles sit on our tongues

Like polite din­ner guests

Who are on the verge of vomiting

But tell the host­ess again and again

How much they enjoyed

The veal parmesan.

It has taken us years to learn the words

But we have become the world’s

Best code talkers,

Our suc­cess matched only

By that of Hos­teen Tsinniginni

And his kin.

 

We speak a lan­guage hav­ing noth­ing to do

With what we feel,

Becom­ing more and more

Adept at the one code

That can­not be broken.

by Carla Chlouber

 

 Chlou­ber estate © all rights reserved