a yellow orb shifts against the shock of dark vertical bark, her back split diagonal, flayed & a bright fleshy suspension in the copse of trees, her hooves scrape packed dirt, legs sway like she’s dancing on hindquarters & I could take her body inside me, like the medicine I need, or wrap her skinned hide, congealed blood flaking, a cloak against the coming night & I’d wear her ears, pin her white-warning-tail to my backside as regalia for all the deer-dead, but the painting only approaches her in 2-d—a portal of slim brushstrokes, paint upon paint, so I step into the field, from the left, outside the frame, push through tall burnished grasses, bending slightly, my feet crush crickets, trample late blooming goldenrod & I let the heat of the day leak out of the air like a balloon popped & swirling, so I can become Field. Dress. Portal. What’s the worst possible thing to ask of yourself? Maybe believing in whatever makes demands on your own inner life, like how love is supposed to save even the most hardened ones. Only this dead doe’s head bows & whistles to the others, come find me—quick, like light, or like all the seedpods’ sudden dispersal, their unrealized progeny float away without a care for the end result.
I wanted to step into the painting—to feel the tree limbs underfoot, to imagine inhabiting the lighted landscape the painter created, to understand the forest in a new way. A painting is 2-D, but how can words make it 3-D? I hope this poem enlivens the painting, creates a portal for the reader, encourages looking up the original artwork, and for the question the poem asks to be worthy of the leap.
"The sacred part of all poets is the golden cord that we share from birth to grave, and beyond. di Prima is, as my friend, the poet Samantha Zighelboim, said of her recently, 'everyone’s.' Her legacy belongs to all of us, with her work always going toward a truth, no matter what that means or how difficult it might be to swallow."
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"This is a big and funky and radical project. And so it gets walked out slowly....I think a lot of people who criticize different kinds of projects also don't understand what we mean. We’re putting a million books in prisons, and that's not even what I would imagine to be the kind of scale that I want a project like this to exist on. We want this Freedom Library to serve the same purpose as the libraries you find in people’s homes."
