Two Poems After Ingo Swann, by Marjorie Maddox

At the American Visionary Art Museum: Madre Dolorosa
                                                                
O invocator of auras, practitioner
of the remote view, of gender fluidity, 

dressed as a nun at Studio 45, you
adore her, Mother of Sorrows;

claim as yours her consciousness; then
weep with her on this canvas for a world

where sacred and cosmic comingle/
collide, phallic-like comets

spiraling toward South America,
atomic mushrooms erupting 

from an ocean of tears below 
the sacred temple of her heart. 
 
Lavender and rose, you rise
in this specter of paint and space

to bow down to apparition, 
Mother Mary, pray for us

to complexity, even to the ecstasy 
of grief now and at the hour

at the hour of her contemplation, 
of our deaths at the hour of your creation, 

Madre Dolorosa at the hour 
of your invocation of this

doomsday vision. 
Amen. Amen.

Marjorie Maddox

after Madre Dolorosa, by Ingo Swann (USA, 1933-2013)
Click here to view image.

**

At the American Visionary Art Museum: Highways
                                                        ​
From here he sees there,
one road running above the other,
the mystery of Mars no asphalt look-alike
but still a twin risen to enlightenment,
riding the rails of space and purple mountains majesty,
the mind’s psychedelic skies just one more way
to somewhere before sailing away
to mirage from that parched desert
or uninhabitable planet
you no longer believe is
not real. Climb in.

Marjorie Maddox

after Highways, by Ingo Swann (USA, 1933-2013)
​Click here to view.

Winner of America Magazine’s 2019 Foley Poetry Prize and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 11 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); True, False, None of the Above (Illumination Book Award Medalist); Local News from Someplace Else; Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award)--the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite); four children’s books; Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (co-editor); Presence (assistant editor); and 550+ stories, essays, and poems in journals and anthologies. www.marjoriemaddox.com