Marianne Szlyk

Painting by Geoffrey Levitt

Respite in the City of Fog

After Hung Ju Kan, Density Versus Emptiness-20-9, 2021 

and Density Versus Emptiness-20-8, 2020

Wearing a mask on the spring Saturday 

when everything’s opening up again,

he wanders through the park he calls nameless.

He knows some would ask the old men who stare

from windows and porches.  Some would Google.

He could ask the leaves but prefers not to. 

Elsewhere maskless people parade up and

down streets past restaurants and stores they once

frequented, once worked in, once aspired to.

But today is a day of respite.  Sea-

green fog reaches for sunlight that will push

it away soon.  Thick, olive leaves promise

scented shade for when the sun becomes strong.

Red roses flicker.  Young butterflies bless

leaves, twigs, grass, empty Red Bull cans, and

the artist who imagines she wanders 

through an old painting she once glimpsed in school,

through the painting she will begin soon. 

Originally published in MacQueen’s Quinterly, August 2021

 

Painting by Geoffrey Levitt

Music in a Spring of Wind and Rain

Piano notes and drumbeats flow,

a waterfall contained in a courtyard.

I imagine a friend, a jazz poet, listening to this 

while his lizard-like mountains bask in fierce sunlight.

The music he heard at their feet was smoke and ash,

rising from parched ground, permeating hair and skin.

Words drifted through like trash or tumbleweed

while smoke hovered over parched ground.

Fountains had been shut down.

Only pennies remained.

Outside the courtyard where I sit, 

rain plunges down the hotel’s façade,

overflowing the sidewalk’s fountains. 

Everything I hear is water.

Originally published in Poetry en Plein Air (Pony One Dog Press, 2020)

 

Painting by Geoffrey Levitt

In Which the Stream Reappears

This spring, its sky the gray of cobwebs,

we learn to walk in almost-rain. 

Today the stream once dwindled to damp dirt 

has returned to bustle through the swamp,

burst over small banks, flood muddy flats, only stopping 

where a robin coolly extracts a worm.

This spring, its scent hidden in cold rain and low clouds,

in bright, cemetery flowers, the fear of touch,

we learn to learn from what we can see

again and again and again and again.

Originally published in Eos: The Creative Context, 2020