For Judy, Whose Husband is Undergoing Surgery Nothing much is going on in this painting: high summer, rolling clouds, deep blue sky. The tall poplars fill the left hand side of the canvas; the Seine slithers, a silvery S, barely visible through the leaves. Someone is standing in the field, knee deep in poppies. It could be you, before the diagnosis, when your life seemed to spread out like a meadow of wildflowers. The detail here is lost in the brush strokes, dots and dashes of red and yellow, green and blue, small exclamations of color, the sky pressing down from above. Now you are trying to decipher the doctor’s calligraphy, the impenetrable code of sonogram and MRI, the odds of choosing this treatment or that. The poppies flare like matches struck in the dark, or something that should not be there, on the monitor screen. If you were to bend and pick them, they would wilt in your hand, the hot orange petals falling to the ground. All you can do is raise your face to the light, which shimmers, elusive, changes but stays the same, a zen riddle. It’s the only thing you can hold onto, and it runs like water through your hands. Barbara Crooker This poem was first published in Barbara Crooker's book, More, C&R Press, 2010. Barbara Crooker is the author of eight books of poetry; Les Fauves is the most recent. Her work has appeared in many anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature, Commonwealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, The Poetry of Presence and Nasty Women: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. www.barbaracrooker.com
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The Ekphrastic Review
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February 2025
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