Poetry
Cursive Landscape
In the reverse psychology of earnestness, more
suddenly meant less. Every tear was a crocodile
hanging from the underlid.
Every nose had its neat dot of moisture.
And for wisdom, there was the Dali Lama.
Who would have thought that a sensible scheme
put down in print would be more sensible yet?
In the sharpened districts where we lived we lived
our little lives, skating on the flat tops
of torn tree trunks divided from root.
What little ledges.
What arrogance was required for each inbreath.
We were offended by the vaguer terms: something,
anywhere, every. Nothing. By the vaguer scenes
seen through windows.
Lives our lives would never touch.
Everything asked. Nothing given.
The grand trees stood guard over a tan and green blank.
To each, the trees meant differently.
To one they were oranges. To another they were branches
divided into a family
frenzy. A sotted father swaying
in the height over a too-small trunk.
Children laughing up into it
with their cruel manners and mud-smeared faces.
To the last, they were color gone bad
in the late November plentiful sorrow.
Tomorrow they would be nothing. Lean against
haven for the breathless and senseless. Houses
for the harried. Squirrels.
A dog barking at the bottom of one.
Once she saw some
uprooted. Like herself laid down into restlessness.
They were breaking her heart she said.
Leafing flattened into feeling. She felt
them falling she said. And turned.
Later we would say it was a golden age,
a dazzling epoch, and if the trees were slight
in their part it wasn’t our fault. Every truth
like no other. No nothing was ever our fault.
Jean Dubuffet, "Paysage cursif (Cursive Landscape),"
Colored crayons and felt tip pen on paper, 1974
Contributor
Mary Jo BangMary Jo Bang is the author of seven collections of poems. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
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