EKPHRASIS: Art & Poetry Edited by Liz Blood
Ekphrasis is an ongoing series joining verse and visual art. Here, poet Steve Bellin-Oka responds to a painting by John Wolfe while recalling the life and death of Matthew Shepard, a 21 year-old student who was killed in an anti-gay hate crime in Wyoming in 1998.
Poem after John Wolfe’s “Residence, Anadarko Okla.” for Matthew Shepard
If we think of time as a whole bolt of cloth we cut swatches from, blue cotton that begins slowly to immediately fray, then for a moment you were the newest well-built thing in the world: the perfect angle of your peaked roof, the unwarped frames of your windows, the glass so clear it almost isn’t there. Then those who planned you hanged white curtains, arranged the furniture— the table in the kitchen with its smooth wood legs, the brown leather loveseat against the dustless living room wall. The closets grew gray suits, a patterned morning dress with sunflowers, the yellow still brilliantine and deep twenty years before it faded to newly ripe lemon rind. And the bassinet in the other room upstairs, the one whose walls they papered with cartoon race cars. As the body does, when it’s allowed to grow older, the bones of the house eventually will begin to creak, the plumbing to lose in its constant wrestle to contain the push of water that flows like blood through arteries. But that much is the future: as the painter puts away her brush, the canvas filled with another well-made thing, the house you grew up in with its green lawn and shrubs spreading forever out of the frame, no one knows but she how they will beat you and hang you like a picture on a cattle fence outside of town. No one knows you will not live. No one knows they will say it could have been me.
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ekphrasis
