[283 words]
~ Inspired by Escher’s Waterfall and Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” ~
Tossing and turning,
I rifle through physics
flash cards, runny with fifth-grade
violet ink. How I rewarded myself
with snickers as I banked new memories
of Newton’s Laws.
I consider the daily grind
of the wheel, the way water falls
on its rudders and struggles to push itself
back up against the rioting force
of gravity. The source of life weakens
as it revolves, but no one defers
duty to lend a maintenance
or tender hand. Nobody cares
to breach a wall, freeing water
from its unaccustomed upward
surge. Staring at Escher’s Waterfall,
I begin to believe
Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.”
The way no one seems to care
if this world misbehaves,
so long as they can trudge
along from plane to plane.
Not the woman hanging
laundry or the man staring off beyond
water’s unschooled rise.
Show me the person meant to mount
the two tiny steps from roof
to stream. Deliver me to wild places,
woodlands where the body walks
without society. Or, even better, crawls
on all fours in the tall grass
and marshes surrendering
to the earth’s dragging tides.
Don’t constrain my segmented
sight with your flashlight’s quick
pools of isolating light silhouetting arms,
the ragged heat of each bedrock breath
and scars annotating the crucible
of life from the mighty stillness
of night. Waiting for doctors
to decipher my scan, lonely
as Escher’s man-made
waterfall while your world
continues to work like its manual says
it should. I want to meet Medusa
or Mary Oliver face to face,
even if I must risk everything
human in me. I want look into a white
pine, a pebble, a blackbird, a peony
and see it as itself, not as a refraction
of me. I want to watch night fill up
the world with stars.
Grace Lynn is an emerging painter who lives with a chronic illness. Her work explores the intersections between faith, the natural world, art and the body. In her spare time, Grace enjoys listening to Bob Dylan, reading suspense novels and investigating absurd angles of art history.
