5 poems
Degas’s Dancers on iPhone 5c
after Degas’s “Dancers, Pink and Green”
None of the dancers are looking at you—their faces
are turned to some urgent task—adjusting a tutu
or tightening a strap before taking the stage.
You couldn’t go to the museum that day, so I went alone
diligently committing to digital memory all my favorites,
like these young dancers, blurred & twice shrunken,
serving the vision of one man’s art, then another.
But now your eye is drawn to the green fireflies
that hover above the dancers’ heads,
and that aren’t Degas’s, but the museum’s lighting
translated through layers of glass—tiny fluorescent dancers
disrupting the composition of this moment,
whose pixels have faintly rearranged what was
preserved in oil paint—the moment endlessly before
the programmed event when the dancers’ muscles
will convert stored energy into a spectacle of light.
The Drone Pilot’s Wife
Along the rows of the kitchen garden
the woman makes
small mounds of bedstraw.
The iron edge of the hoe
bites into the earth.
An oriole utters
into the deep red. In another country
an unmanned aircraft
flies over burning fields.
As each red sky
reaches into the great darkness
the woman pulls off her gloves.
Behind her, thin square
shadows of the wire fence
lift from the chopped radicchio.
Dalí’s Ladder
From the black sleeve of his dream
Jacob delivers a shadow of the other
universe: the chattering of wooden
tiles: shuffle of angel feet on the ladder.
Dalí’s Ladder: The Ribbon
Between them, a red
ribbon draws itself
in the sand: the partition
between waking
and its white reflection.
There is no trick. No knot.
The ribbon draws
their blood.
The memory walks
toward him again, frightened
bees spilling from her head.
Dalí’s Ladder: The Trick
The ribbon turns between unearthly
places: a twist of her wrist
unstitches
the rhododendron: the angels don
the long skirts of battle: the garden
swallows
its blossom: the hair of the dandy
is Napoleon’s
varnished coif: each petal
a near accident
born of skill
and circumstance.
M.L. Martin is an interdisciplinary poet and translator whose language-based installation, Journey to Shoshone Falls, is currently on display at The Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma through March 15, 2020. Both the installation and her chapbook of the same name (Journey to Shoshone Falls, Walls Divide Press) use archival material, found texts, and translation to create textual interventions in the archival landscape around the canonical Thomas Moran painting “Shoshone Falls on the Snake River.” Her experimental translations of Old English can be found, or are forthcoming, in Arkansas International, Black Warrior Review, Brooklyn Rail In Translation, The Capilano Review, Columbia Journal, The Kenyon Review Online, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry has appeared in Denver Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, The Massachusetts Review, PRISM international, and many other Canadian and American literary journals. She currently lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she is a 2018 - 2020 Tulsa Artist Fellow. Learn more at M-L-Martin.com