Three After Agnes Martin, by JoAnna Scandiffio

Tremelo, by Agnes Martin (USA, b. Canada) 1962

Translating Agnes Martin
 
She kept her knitting needles in a wooden paint box, a reminder that she could unravel at any moment. Become sheared wool.  Sometimes she would shake the box to hear the needles rumble among paint brushes which were too soft to speak. She knew objects had their music, and if she spoke fluent French, she would be able to translate their muse. No one considered her nonsense as part of her process. She made no sense.  She stripped vistas into grids. Grids into window blinds. It was essential for her to hide the undertow, how she wept when she crushed kitchen ants that kept her company when there was no moon. 

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​Agnes Martin’s Knitting Needles
 
It was easier.   To repeat.   Repetitiveness calmed her hands. It was almost like knitting. But not like making a scarf or a pullover for someone who needs warmth. But knitting for knitting’s sake. Like the way my grandmother would stir pasta in our cooking pot. Sometimes, to do something. Sometimes, to watch water boil. Sometimes, to remember the old house with chickens in the backyard, chewing on her tomato vines. Agnes didn’t cook or knit. She didn’t want her painting to say something. She knew everything had been said more than once and that we should have stopped with Shakespeare or Fra Angelico’s saints. The ones who wore halos, rain or shine. Agnes didn’t say this out loud. She didn’t want her critics to see chickens, tomatoes, saints. She made lines thinner than knitting needles. placing them one under the other.  Evenly spaced.  One alongside the other.  Evenly spaced.  Radiating light. Sonnets.  My grandmother stirring water.

Drift of Summer, by Agnes Martin (USA, b. Canada) 1965

​Is it Boring   Agnes Martin 
 
all those endless lines   her grids   
 
do we miss Constable’s white horse
his rivers of green trees   
 
a time past    that never was
tranquil
 
that quaint word that holds 
bird feather fallen into quill
 
our longing for water wells 
 
Or are her   horizontal
vertical lines
 
the sharp spine of a porcupine 
 
trees cut down 
with no horses    waiting for us 

JoAnna Scandiffio

JoAnna Scandiffio is a graduate gemologist living in San Francisco. "My poems are like bird nests, assembled with fragments randomly connected to capture the moment. My work has appeared in Calyx, The Poeming Pigeon, Poets 11, The MacGuffin, Italian Americana, The RavensPerch, The Ekphrastic Review, and other journals. I am a Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist for the Jane Underwood Prize. My chapbook Water Is Never Still is available from Finishing Line Press."

The White Horse, by John Constable (England) 1819