Poetry by Mary Catherine Harper
Photography by Thomas Born
and Mary Catherine Harper
pauses before “Self Portrait,”
those still eyes pleading
as if to say “you who gaze,
please to buy my naked face.”
Where tellers once stood
picture the artists, money
not quite their purpose.
Picture my lover
roaming, the vacant bank vault
open, lined with wolf,
grizzly bear, elk, and wild horse
pawing the canvas and frame.
Photo courtesy of Sentinel-Tribune of Defiance, OH you are too beautiful for
sweaty flesh-and-bloods
like me. Do you become
human when golden
circus hoops are stuffed
into a cubby on the coach
for stars, when the mask
you’ve painted drips away?
roof a magnet attracting
bright foliage and limbs.
Yellow leaves falling,
roof invites dead branches as
insurance goes up.
Yellow leaves falling,
you can't ignore their tango,
like potato chips
no one can follow just one,
the eyes dance from leaf to leaf.
Winter sun bleeds white
ice cracking into the lake,
the symbol’s slow melt.
Winter sun bleeds hot
plot of last summer’s affair,
passé as scorched skin.
Winter sun bleeds cold
mind in water’s undertow,
the story’s progress.
Winter sun bleeds white
light flashing before her eyes,
lucid as love drowns.
sure of control over a thing
kept close but never loved,
do you know the tuba near
the steps is about to run,
hoping against telekinesis
wasting coal, huffed to neutral, wheels stuck
fast to the rail encircling the hardwood floor,
the train that will go anywhere, everywhere
on the earth, even the sea and sky if you let it,
as soon as the plastic pigs clear the track
the intimacy shared by family or
old lovers, because I had not slept
for thirty-six hours, because you
were late for a hair appointment,
our fate to bump into each other
having put yourself so far above
the rest of us, having climbed to
the top of the nest of us, having
stepped on your oldest friend, who
boosted you into your first tree
that squirt of water doesn’t quite
dissolve the calcium scum, this
bottle of Windex at the belt, these
the accoutrements for the preferred
occupation of peeping toms
drill bits standing on end in
shallow holes of a workbench
can’t help but be a village
of skyscrapers, designed to
compete for space with planes
that everything ends eventually,
no dramatic exit, just weathered
down to the first layer, this stain
of paint ambiguous from the start,
no absolute directions left behind
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