Sarah Riggs
Bacon’s Van Gogh
Walking to deformation: nearly direction smears
Earth under the jag lane: through gape black
Crops of red: blurred psyches stroked in
Slung behind another: box recedes the painter
•
Tree bones or tanks: misshapen phallic gestures
leafless, to the left, to the left
Burnt brown candle stub of leg: shades the right peg aside
Volcanic solid half: limb and face one viscous dip
Flesh chars away closer: profile huge, entirely without eye
•
Blood, dung, ocher mixed to canvas: straw patches smother out
Frame, walking stick, rim of hat: yellow, mad, thin
Slurring tan: red blent white sludges out yeses
Arles pastels
The azure stripped: demarcates scorched under
Flesh pink all over the road: melts to ward in
Exterior with Woman Hanging Sheets
I will perhaps send you some oranges from my garden
with their leaves.
–Berthe Morisot, letter to Stephane Mallarme,
28 February 1889
She flecks dozens greens by
Ocher priming spreads through
Rectangles draped and white
Strokes hatch cerulean rose
Rustles a pair wide and spare
Brushed blanks barely hung
Over the smudged foliage
The woman hangs arranges
Dress aside much understated
Features thick fold she alights
Weighted skirts a cast of cloth
Violet undulates by all blue
Her arms a small garment dry
Pause the brisk diagonals lift
Line strung a garden of white
Bits hung between still thinner
Rust-burnished squares curved
As her elbow abutting left sheet
Enfolded orange surfacing maybe
Breath stretched between breast
Sarah Riggs will publish Word Sightings: Visual Media and the American Poet in summer 2002 (Routledge) and is currently writing a book of poems. She paints and photographs color abstracts, and lives in Paris and Provence.