© Joanna Lisi 2015
Ice Mountains
Oil on Canvas
© Joanna Lisi 2006
Basillica
Oil on Canvas
© Johanna Lisi
Les Deux Gamins
Oil on Canvas
© Joanna Lisi 2005
Rafael Bridge
Oil on Canvas
© Joanna Lisi
Beach Balls
Oil on Canvas
16" x 12
© Joanna Lisi
Sunset on the Hudson River
Oil on Canvas
The Way Down
1.
Time swings her burning hands
I saw him going down
Into those mythic lands
Bearing his selfhood's gold,
A last heroic speck
Of matter in his mind
That ecstasy could not crack
Nor metaphysics grind.
I saw him going down
Veredical with bane
Where pastes of phosphor shine
To a cabin underground
Where his hermit father lives
Escaping pound by pound
From his breast-buckled gyves
In his hermit father's coat,
The coat without a seam,
That the race, in its usury, bought
For the agonist to redeem,
By dying in it, one
Degree a day till the whole
Circle's run.
2.
When the magician died, I wept,
I also died, I under leaf forgot
The stars, the distaff, and the crystal bowl.
I hugged the ignorance of stone
Under the line of crickett's thunder
Where the white chariot of the winter sun
Raced to the axle pole.
Why am I suddenly warm all over?
By the small muths of the rain
I'm tempted. Must I learn again to breathe?
Help me, my wordlings, leave
To the hoot owl in the dismal wood
His kingdom of blight
And empty branching halls.
Air thickens to dirt.
Great hairy seeds that soar aloft
Like comers trailing tender spume
Break in the night with soft
Explosions into bloom.
Where the fleshed out root stirs,
Marvelous horned strong game,
Brine-scaled, dun-caked with mould,
Dynastic thunder-bison, Asian-crude,
Bedded in moss and slime,
Wake, and the rhythm of their blood
Shoots through the long veins of my name.
Hail, thickets! Hail, dark stream!
3.
Time swings her burning hands.
The blossom is the fruit,
And where I walk, the leaves
Lie level with the root.
My brave god went from me,
I saw him going down
Incorrigibly wild
In a cloud of golden air.
O father in the wood,
Mad father of us all,
King of our antlered walls,
Our candelabrum-pride
That the pretender kills,
Receive your stumbling child
Drunk with the morning-dew
Into your fibrous love
With which creation's strung;
Embrace him, raise him high,
Keeping the old time young,
And hold him through the night
with the brilliance of the stars;
the whole of the earth was his to inherit
and his to share with every human spirit.
Eleanor Roosevelt: The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.
