Why do I end up with just the black dot in the outline view when I post a poem?  Could it be the header thing when I copy and paste?

Chloroplasts

Where is    
she
in this self-portrait,
hesitant
at the water well,
thinning
and thinning
until what endures is neither color
nor clue.

Hands dry and chapped,
she grows dill
in the ridges of her knuckles.
Constant running water forces
the feathery leaves
to seek the sun
below the flesh
and her veins course with chlorophyll.
Still she thins,    chewing on her lower lip
when the pain becomes unsettling.

Where is
she
in this self-portrait?
Potted
behind the figure of a woman
reclining.  Twisting
away from the light,     nestled
on a bed of blue-smeared paint rags.
She is basil,
waiting for a good rinse
at the sink of a competent cook.

© 2009

 

"It is with a strange malice / That I distort the world." 
 -- from The Weeping Burgher by Wallace Stevens

Profile Site of Patricia Gomes

 

            

Pat-
Did you write your question right up at the top of the "message" space? I've noticed that the Outline view usually has the first few words of the very top line in the Outline so we can get the poem by selecting the line. Otherwise, we have to go out of the Outline and PW page to select the poem, and then go back to Bookmarks to get back to the PW page.

The last stanza of your poem reminds me of DD#2's "Self Portrait" she painted when she was away at a college in a small town in Ontario, living in a rented room in an attic in an older house that had a problem with flies. For her self portrait project she used acrylics to paint a vertical picture of a potted plant, with her head replacing the five buds ,each of which had two leaves acting as arms. Each face had a different expression, some were looking at others, and one face was angry, reaching with her leaf-arms toward a plasitc bug glued on the picture.

She got an A on the project, with a grade of 99! She included the slide of that picture in her portfolio, which she submitted to the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, and other Canadian art colleges, and was accepted in all of them. She heard that the committee at ACAD (where she got her BFA) was particularly impressed with the self portrait.

Have you painted or drqwn a picture to illustrate this poem?

Roberta

Why can't poet's like you be in my workshop?  I went into this quarters workshop excited and expectant to get something great out of it - and instead all I'm getting is frustrated.  Where are the real poets?

Anyway, I only have one nit.  It's not even a nit, just a pointing out of a typo.  In the last stanza, "twisting" isn't capitalized, but it is beginning a line.  Typo?  Mistake on a period that should be a comma?  You decide :)

~Smiley