Lost in Kandinsky, by David Southward

Composition VII, by Wassily Kandinsky (France) 1913

Lost in Kandinsky
 
Start anywhere: a purple curlicue
bisecting an arc
of barbed wire, suspended in sky-blue
and yellow nebulae. Plunge with your eye
through vortices
of paper cut-outs, whirling ostrich feathers
and stenciled mitochondria. Golf tees, neckties,
succulent speared olives
orbiting rainbows
of wrinkled cellophane: the whole fiery glitter
leading inevitably to that red throb
of war in the corner. With its tangled kites, its rotors
spewing ribbons of hemoglobin, the mandala’s
big-bang windmill
inhales all but one charioteer
who escapes. See where he’s headed: Psychedelia,
where polka dots float
like embryos - through the permeable
stained-glass membranes
of a heaven
with no vanishing point.
 
David Southward

This poem first appeared in Stoneboat Literary Journal.

David Southward teaches in the Honors College at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His collections include Bachelor’s Buttons (Kelsay Books 2020) and Apocrypha, a sonnet sequence based on the Gospels (Wipf & Stock 2018). David is a two-time winner of the Lorine Niedecker Prize and in 2019 his poem “Mary’s Visit” received the Frost Farm Prize for Metrical Poetry. He resides in Milwaukee with his husband, Geoff, and their two beagles. Read more at davidsouthward.com.