Hortensia Anderson: THE EMPTY PLATE

The enameled plums are plump and deeply blue on a creamy underglaze. Camellias bloom over the edges. Three centuries haven’t wilted the pale pink petals nor dulled the porcelain’s glossy finish.

devoured …
the clusters of ripe green grapes
we held in our hands

by Hortensia Anderson

New York City, New York

Hortensia Anderson: RETURNING

My father was a fisherman. Before dawn, he surfcast off the coast of Montauk from a favourite boulder he liked to stand on. Ten years after his death, I return during a storm and come upon the boulder awash in waves. For some reason, I expected it to have gone with him.

dusk in winter –
a roiling sea
churns the sand

by Hortensia Anderson

New York City, New York

Hortensia Anderson: ANDALUSIAN GAZPACHO

The tomatoes – seemingly ripened and reddened by the summer day – are cored and quartered. The holiest of trinities – fresh garlic ground by my mortar and pestle into paste, moistened stale breadcrusts and sherry vinegar from Sevilla have been stirred into a glass bowl – their flavours have seeped into brilliant colour. As night spreads her tablecloth of stars, I smooth the soup, anointing it with olive oil from Cordoba.

almost autumn –
a Flamenco tune
on a lone guitar

by Hortensia Anderson

New York City, New York

Jeffrey Woodward: INSTITUTE OF ARTS

Whenever I visit the Detroit Institute of Arts, when I tire of taxing my mind and my eyes with contemplation of Cezanne’s portrait of his wife, Hortense, or Botticelli’s Resurrected Christ, or even the rather grandiosely didactic but celebrated Detroit Industry mural by Diego Rivera, I relax by visiting some of the rare puppets on display that make up a part of the Paul McPharlin Collection.

McPharlin was probably the premier American authority on puppetry in the first half of the 20th century, a highly skilled puppeteer and puppet-maker himself, and founder of the Marionette Fellowship Troupe during the Great Depression years in Detroit. He also authored The Puppet Theatre in America, still considered a standard reference in the field. Unfortunately, McPharlin died in 1948 at the young age of 45.

It is no small thing to master an art, even if that art is rarely appreciated. So, again, I visit McPharlin’s collection, the puppets carefully suspended under glass, looking now at an exquisite Chinese marionette, now at a rare French clown or even at one of McPharlin’s own original and delicate creations:

for the marionette
deprived of its falsetto,
a dream of dancing

by Jeffrey Woodward

Detroit, Michigan

first published in Lynx XXII:2, June 2007

Jeffrey Woodward: SUMMER GROVE

On one hand, the terrible heat of a midday sun in this broad and open meadow in July. On the other hand, the inviting denim-blue edge of the woods as one approaches it through a humid haze.

Tempting to believe, even at the risk of mosquito and black fly or nettle and bramble, that the dense foliage might afford some temporary relief from the unobstructed light that is now all too intimate, insistent and palpable.

Even so, one halts immediately before the woods, once one has arrived, for not far beyond the bright and glittering leaves at its circumference, one can see clearly that what, at a distance, looked so inviting rapidly becomes, upon close inspection, a gathering darkness. Hesitation, however, is, of necessity, a temporary state. One eventually walks on:

only after my shadow
into the deep summer
of a grove’s recess

by Jeffrey Woodward

Detroit, Michigan

first published in Nisqually Delta Review, V. 3, N. 2, 2007