Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra
(Dali, 1936)
Having always used her music as a tool, a gift to stifle hurt in others, a niche into which she could stuff pansies or wallflowers, a grey to be drenched with peony or tangerine, she became pliable, perfectly responsive to circumstance, a kitten following its master, chase-and-nibble. At first she didn’t notice herself changing, so intent was she on pacifying with titbits the yawning jaw. Filling the jug of subjugation. Until she awoke in a boulder-desert, stone-faced, immaterial. Her life shrunk now to two needers who dominated: her mother and her daughter. Her music no more than a cipher, a distorted keyboard painted on a banner wrung out, flung out between her and the others, a mute offering. The godlike gift something less now than animal or vegetable. A split skewed thing. And she, a rock-musician, no longer able to please anyone.
(first published in Tears in the Fence 55)
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Geraldine Clarkson’s poems have appeared in Tears in the Fence, Poetry Review, Envoi, the Grist anthology A Complicated Way of Being Ignored, and at Ink, Sweat and Tears
andotherpoems.com 