Still life with an adobe wall
Straw that sticks from the tawned adobe
house without roof
doorframe five foot four
likes of Absalom who must stoop
brushing back their hair
Cactus sprouts from a top corner
fruits green and pink
hollowed out by gorriones
or cinched up with feed bags
means someone is watching.
Three doors down
the old sheetmetal roof
rests snug to the neighbors’
sheetmetal walls
Absentee landlord
long dead in the States
or in an asylum over there
cut out of the orchard
where the headpiece still swings.
Sticks tawny clay
manure
somebody’s beaded mezcal
in the heat of a morning
does not stain like the blood
from the ricochet
and we know donkeys long dead
shit these bricks.
One window
like a rifle slit
still blocked up from the Porfiriato
My math is bad
but not that bad
Or is it still the Porfiriato
Still life with Sua
Marisua’s oil canvas Tlaloc
bright paint slathered thick
like clay
by insect hands
is ghastly.
Only close up
eye inches from the clumps and rows
can you see the January cornfield
Sua’s every stroke
left for us to look at
last October
like those of a farmer
in a junkfield of art.
The peak and furrow of the god’s senseless eye
too close to the divine for sense or story
too close to my eye for sight –
but it smells like the wall
I realize
behind it.
That one now
that one I painted.
Still life under the volcano
Scrub vine hugs the face of the hill
with pestered purple flowers.
Sam with his head thrown back
laughing for all time
Buddha bald pate shiny and friezed
that day in our lives
Crouched under the crucifix
in the shade of the chapel
under the volcano
Individual spokes of the sun
unique tendrils of ash
and the plate glass of time
pressed down against every twitch:
We can not move
The painter already
put his puttyknife down.
Colin Gee (@ColinMGee) is founder and editor of The Gorko Gazette. Stories and novellas in The Penult with LEFTOVER Books. His novel Lips with Anxiety Press. Poetry and play out with DUMBO Press.
High Horse 