~ after Leonora Carrington, "Self Portrait: The Inn of the Dawn Horse" To make strange, we propose departures from the ordinary, offer the unexpected. For instance, switch from certainty to ambiguity, from indecision to intuitive purpose. My students and I have been looking at surrealist paintings—in one, the artist wears white jodhpurs and has unloosed her hair into a wild abundance. A pale horse sprints in the grass outside the open window. Everything can be read as a beckoning. Or a reckoning. The rocking horse is about to clatter off the walls, and the striped hyena with three teats softens her face and makes a delicate gesture with one leg. I want to believe she is prophecy; that she still retains a maternal instinct, one that a life of art or the mind hasn't scarred or blunted.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
