TOWARD DISAPPEARANCE
It started during the fires.
Northeast city crested in flames.
Door to your house is open, you stand
framed, shock of white hair.
Smoke has infested the walls,
we’re slightly light-headed. And
in the blue of your bed, we fall just how
I fall into that Sam Francis painting
I’m in love with. Toward Disappearance.
Wall of canvas, mostly white, except
a vertical movement of blue,
with moments of red and green thrown in.
It does seem Sam threw paint in one simple
gesture. But it is never as easy as that.
Oil paint translucent as the blue glass
of water you hand me. Or the deep saturation
of paint in cell shaped forms moving on canvas.
It had to have taken months.
Which is how long it feels this afternoon,
us here, in this house of refuge while the hills
burn and the fan overhead moves September heat.
I have loved you for fifteen years,
you say. I know that isn’t true and I don’t care.
You’re here to end the dormant years, just
how last time you woke me in the sad years.
There’s a low murmur from your yard,
barely audible. Blue agave is witness.
Out of the black char on the hills, seeds germinate,
burst painfully from their hulls, reach for the sun.
Alicia Vogl Saenz’s poems have appeared in Grand Street, Blue Mesa Review, and Mischief, Caprice, and Other Poetic Strategies. She authored the chapbook, The Day I Wore the Red Coat. Most recently, her translation of Spanish poet Mariano Zaro’s book, Tres Letras, was published. She has been a practitioner of Shambhala Buddhism for 7 years.
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