Medley

 

Medley 30 x 24 cm acryl on canvas by Karin Goeppert

THE SWEET AND THE SOUR

Keep going, she said, never stop.

The first place was a window seat

near a picture of Mary and her Little Lamb,

the window right above an approximately vertical   

driveway and she, unofficial goddess of mirth,

threatening to dangle us from the window ledge. Proving?

Even mothers can have a fairly fucked-up sense of humor.

The second place had lemons and limes

pieces of which floated in the potent beverages

   of village elders.

The third place was a desert landscape.

A cactus garden in the side yard. It scared me. It

was too sharp. There was grapefruit with sugar sprinkled on top

paving a soft pink highway to the sweet and sour, the wisdom

of precisely mixed opposites, and that you could eat them with breakfast.

Then:

                                                                              a seminal scene

from Fellini Satyricon: a naked African girl

in bed with two smitten bi-sexual boys,

chattering in a pretty language no man can understand

but wants to listen to for the rest of his life, her breasts

like two small perfect fruits you might find

ripening in some amply watered oasis in Ethiopia or Somalia,

her hands like elegant birds hovering in space—

though where the sour amid all of this sweetness might be

found is not entirely clear, and should remain so,

and why this scene should be deemed “seminal” is

not all that clear either, but we will leave it at that—

and a crucial moment in “Sentimental Education” when Flaubert

has Frederic Moreau feel compassion for the gray haired woman

he glimpses briefly behind shutters,

the older woman he was obsessed with in his youth

when the sweet and the sour

wouldn’t have been seen on the same plate together

speaks for itself, and that is enough.

 

Coming Home

 

Reclining Figure 80 x 60 cm c/o Karin Goeppert

BEAUTY

You deep read some pretty girl’s mangled syntax

as if it were a dissertation on the Metaphysical Poets.

Alone, the spectacle of her thighs invites sonnets and arias.

Curled up on her lap are your dirtiest thoughts,

brimming with ambition. But instead of making your day

she makes you put snow tires on her car, a cute

little import, and says “Thanks, “dad,” ” as she hands you ten bucks.

The mushrooms are ravishing: freckled, tinged ochre, shapely.

Some of them look like very attractive underwater creatures.

But only the reckless would eat them. The ignorant

or self-destructive. Just look at them. And what of those

other “shrooms”, the dried-out kind locked up in a baggy, which

if they could sing would sound just like the lovely Grace Slick?

I’m looking at a post-modern

cave painting, some interestingly orchestrated

slabs of color, or I’m looking at a sheepish Ulysses

drag a half-empty wine skin into his wife’s bed; she stops

curling her eight pound novel, smiles, flexes, reluctantly reassures,

“Of course I missed you, you big pussy.” Now, that’s pretty. 

White Trash Wedding

Quantum 39 x 49 cm c/o Karin Goeppert

Masquerade

Purple Eclipse 60 x 50 cm - acryl/oil pastel on canvas board c/o Karin Goeppert

POSTCARD

How much vodka do I need

the quantity ought to be just enough   

to submerge a distracting past    

picked and pawed through for fifty-five minutes

a week which is why you moved to Brussels

adding to all that bureaucratic bloat

the empty elegant little life

you have always wanted to live

which is not as bad as it sounds if you are

empty and elegant to begin with

which is not as bad as it sounds if you really  

truly adore the Flemish language, darling, and

there’s this awesome beach on Lesbos where the wind

comes up from behind you and the water is still and glassy

as the eye of a Buddha slash maître d’ just before it winks

love slipping away quietly on a fishing boat at dusk. 

RECOLLECTIONS AND OTHER LIES

 

Ein fiebriger Moment - A feverish Moment 50 x 70 cm c/o Karin Goeppert

RECOLLECTIONS AND OTHER LIES

It ain’t fine but it does have a certain

rustic poise, the wine, a voluptuous

body and there are the cherry tomatoes,

goat cheese, sardines in oil, the Mediterranean

religion, pleasure in a word,

yes and again yes, date palms like hula skirts

fired up in the hot sun, and as a bonus we’re making love

in our six-star boudoir. Pure fantasy, I’m afraid, a lie.

What I’d really like to recollect, if it were possible—

because to re-collect properly you must first have “collected” something—

is the cloistered white-washed silence

of hundreds of miniscule churches—

one tiny space each, stuffed with dust-furred icons—and

more or less surrounded by cooing dove-cotes

on Myconos and Tinos

neither of which we can afford to visit, and never will

ditto Lesbos

where the head of Orpheus is still said

to chatter away on the beach at Molyvos

urging hungry, somewhat surprised tourists

to drop in at Uncle Kosta’s tavern, just behind the port,

   for fish with very special sauce.  

You told me a few years ago that only the

irreducible mattered, the delectably

inaccessible, is how you put it, an awkward phrase

but pretty impressive for a junior college drop-out. I was hooked.

I recall

we were eating gyros and pita bread in the city and

I asked you to abandon your husband and child

and “run away” with me—and how

you couldn’t stop laughing at the “very thought.”

I’ll never forget that.

And your legs. And your bottom 

as you walked over to feed the juke box, how

it seemed, beneath the polka dots, to have a rubbery life all its own.

 And, yes, the mole you might have had right between your eyes—

or was that some other dream?

Stoned Again

 

Fast da! - Almost there! 38,5 x 28,5 cm c/o Karin Goeppert

THE REAL LIFE

is a pill that if ingested will illuminate every leaf on every tree

   in the Garden of Abshard,

famed for its orchards, poets, and the restorative powers of its water.   

Or: a train station in provincial Austria, which may be redundant,

so: a train station in Austria.

The shabby genteel restaurant within.

Sweaty citizens gorging on blood pudding  

and ambiguous potato dumplings floating in porcelain bowls of clear broth.

After which schnapps is called for by a man dressed in Lederhosen

while in the bathroom the ghost of Thomas Bernhard pukes into a sink.

“The hairy skin of only the plumpest raspberries is used to make our schnapps.”

Did you know that Shakespeare invented the word “pewk?”

And when was the last time you heard the designation “shabby genteel”

applied to something or someone?

James Joyce?

The back streets of Charleston, S.C.?

My grandmother’s living room?

What if “the real life” doesn’t mean anything anymore either?

Or maybe the really real, at this moment in time anyway,

                                                    is a walk to the store. Along the way  

                                 a creek, and a pot-holed gravel path

                   down which a languid girl in a straw hat, smoking a jazz cigarette,  

saunters by, singing a song none of us will ever hear again.

 Some cool music after read more!

Kind of Proud

 

Blau - Blue 38,5 x 48,5 cm pastel/ink by Karin Goeppert

 

PRIDE

is a fixed bayonet

with which you

run screaming toward the enemy’s trenches.

It’s me ready to shoulder through a pack

of young muscular Turks

blocking the sidewalk, Karin’s shivery fingers

in my hand as she trails a little behind

muttering idiot, idiot, let’s cross the street.

Too late, honey, we’re surrounded.

But we cross the street anyway. It’s almost never too late.