Without the Rain’s Taut Blue Skin

1. Foreground

Pigment on metal
pools her body
as an uprooted yellow-brown tuber
over the parched field,
reflects plateau light,  not wavered
with mirage.  No dream:
the torso's window open
to the broken spinal stalk
that branches a leafy heart, veins
bleeding magenta on the arid bed.

2. Background

Withered leaf, phantom
seed, where Indigenos
die, do not reclaim
fields.  Los Fridos students
know she will not take the brush
from a younger hand.
This is the way she attended
the child she was: breath on the window,
finger-drawn escape from the lame leg,
imagined skipping outside cobalt-blue walls.
 
 
Copyright 1998, Linda Greenmun
 
Linda Greenmun has a poem in the Spring, 1998, issue of Poetry Northwest and is an editor for Floating Bridge Press.

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