Exploring the Picture, by Henry Stimpson

Improvisation 35, by Wassily Kandinsky (Russia) 1914

Exploring the Picture
 
Grope through fog,
stumbling over red
watermelon dreams,
a floating in
and out of shape...
 
Now I walk
on plate glass
above brown water,
bug feelers
and pond grass,
 
cross a big depth
of dry yellow crust...
 
Further on,
a football helmet
lined with red plush:
I curl up in it, awake
 
and find crayons,
streak contrails
on the sky.
 
I see a sun skewered
on a cock's comb
 
and a house,
maybe a friend's,
tilted on the horizon's mound--
 
in that house
I'd like to live.
 
Henry Stimpson

This poem first appeared in Beauty/Truth.

Henry Stimpson’s poems, essays, humor, and articles have appeared in Cream City Review, Lighten Up Online, Rolling Stone, Muddy River Poetry Review, The Auroean, Common Ground Review, Vol1Brooklyn, Poets & Writers, The Boston Globe, Yankee, New England Ancestors, New England Monthly, Bostonia, Boston Phoenix, Beauty/Truth, Embodied Effigies, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Ovunque Siamo. He’s been a public relations consultant and freelance writer for many years. Before that, he was a reference librarian, the librarian of a maximum-security prison and a cabdriver. He lives in Massachusetts.