ARTSPEAK! Poem #8 & Our Progressive Poem!!

First of all: Hello, and welcome to latest installment of Our 2015 Progressive Poem! It's so much fun watching this poem grow and develop day by day. Thank you to everyone who has delivered their lines so far... and to those yet to come, I am so looking forward to wherever you're going to take us!

You'll notice a couple of changes in this version of our poem. Jone's first line has been edited slightly, at Jone's request. (She and Joy decided "deposits" was redundant.) Also, I've broken the lines into couplets (one way to add white space to long lines). And with my line I've brought the poem back to the delta!

It looks to me like we may have a mermaid on our hands, now that we have moved from bare feet to tail... A delta mermaid? Interesting! I'm excited to learn more about our "she" as the poem progresses.



She lives without a net, walking along the alluvium of the delta.
Shoes swing over her shoulder, on her bare feet stick jeweled flecks of dark mica.

Hands faster than fish swing at the ends of bare brown arms. Her hair flows,
snows in wild wind as she digs in the indigo varnished handbag,

pulls out her grandmother's oval cuffed bracelet,
strokes the turquoise stones, and steps through the curved doorway.

Tripping on her tail she slips hair first down the slide... splash!
She glides past glossy water hyacinth to shimmer with a school of shad.

Take it away, Mary Lee!

And now, here's poem #8 of ARTSPEAK!, my Poem-a-Day Project for National Poetry Month 2015, in which I am writing from images found in the online collections of the National Gallery of Art and focusing on dialogue, conversations, what does the piece say?



Today's piece is "Head of a Dog" by Auguste Renoir.

Cute, isn't she? (I don't know, but I imagine her female.) Renoir did lots of portraits, but not many of animals.

A painting like this leaves little mystery in terms of POV, but it allows all sorts of freedom when you start thinking about who this dog might be talking TO.

When I started writing, I was thinking this is a homeless dog, and I started writing a profile, like they do at the animal shelter. Then, I started thinking about how this poem could be To the Boy Who Passed By the Window at 10 AM This Morning (or somesuch). And then I thought, what if this little dog's beloved owner has died? Could the poem be an elegy for the good and faithful owner?

But I couldn't get any of those to work the way I wanted to. AND THEN, finally, I landed on the poem that wanted to be written:

Readers who have been keeping up: notice something in this poem?? There it is again... waiting!