Highway 61 Revisited as a Comic Book Page (Photo: Leslie Schultz0
Crusadering
for Lynn
No need for Gotham searchlights on the highway.
Full sun shines down upon this Batmobile,
this shiny purple pickup truck on its way
somewhere, with something epic to reveal.
“DKN1GHT” is stamped on plates from Dairyland.
The tailgate sports a spooky cityscape,
with cauled crimestoppers standing hand by hand,
taller than buildings, masked, and wearing capes.
Silvery bats with outstretched wings adorn
the tailgate and the pristine trailer hitch.
A plushy Batman bounces up to warn
all evil-doers to supress the itch.
It costs a pretty penny, you could say,
to illustrate how crime will never pay.
Leslie Schultz
This weekend is all about traveling along the Mississippi River for us–to Trempeauleau and to Red Wing for family celebration and for poetry. This poem, written earlier this spring, was inspired by sonnets galore, by a trip to Winona that Tim and I took last July, and by my friend, Lynn, a poet who lives in NYC, the real Gotham.
I hope that your own journeys contain some unexpected sight before their safe conclusions!
Musée de l’Homme, Paris (Photo: Lynn Sara Lawrence)
I had hoped to be able to write at least one new poem during this National Poetry Month 2024, and I did. The poem below, written for Earth Day, reflects on how we are all made of earthern materials, just as all the creation myths describe. Millenia older than writing, and still a forceful way for young humans to mark their presence, the hand print will never lose its power for either the maker or the viewer.
Terracotta
Handprints on cave walls splay,
outlined with iron oxides—
red, white, black &
yellow ochre, charcoal, clay.
Human touch everywhere:
yes, notice, too,
we are each signed, stamped
vessels of earthenware.
Leslie Schultz
Cave at Tito Bustillo, Asturias, Spain (Photo: Lynn Sara Lawrence)
I am grateful to Lynn Sara Lawrence for sharing photos with me–and now here–from her travels to ancient sites and museums in Europe that safeguard and interpret early art. (Note: her photographs are of facsimilies on display, not of actual cave art, which is carefully protected.) I had not heard before of Musée de l’Homme in Paris, and now wish that I could see their current exhibtion called “Préhistomania.”
I hope that today you find a way to make your mark while also living lightly–and light-heartedly–on our shared Earth.
LESLIE
Me, in Northfield’s Central Park, helping to decorate Booker the Book Bus in 2007 (Photo: Julia Braulick)
The final section of Geranium Lake is titled “Roadside Attraction.” It contains poems about what might be termed outsider art, from haute coutre to the fiberglass statue of the Jolly Green Giant or the simple design of the oriole feeder above. Innovation, inspiration, and good design can be found all around us. I, for one, do regard these one-of-a-kind objects as art.
Zinc
for Corrine
Years ago, my now-deceased neighbor
set out small zinc dishes, fitted
them into shallow depressions she routed out
into the wood of her back-porch railing
before filling them with purple jelly.
She had made the jelly, too,
from fruit of the crabapple tree at the front
of her house. She was set on enticing
the orange wink and blur of northern orioles
to this feeder of her own design
again, that spring, when she’d called me to bring
my fitful camera. We waited, talking
softly in the green-shadowed garden.
None of the orioles came that afternoon,
but her own nature, the sweetness of intention,
pierces me now from behind my chance image,
this still-glossy photograph: a churned
surface of red-violet jelly, like a sea storm
at sunset, and one delirious drunken wasp,
diving headlong, accepting the sublime dish.
Leslie Schultz
Corrine and Peanut
This concludes the preview to Geranium Lake. Later this summer, when the book is published, I will make an announcement here. Thank you for allowing me to share a first glimpse with you. It isn’t enclycopedic work on art–there are no poems in Geranium Lake inspired by film, fiction, dance, or drama, for instance–but I have enjoyed putting this collection together. Perhaps someday, in another book, I will have other poems that reflect and consider other forms of art and art-making. In any case, I shall keep my eyes open and my pencil ready!
Meanwhile, I hope you will see art in expected, and unexpected, places–today and everyday!
As many of you already know, I find postcards evocative, and often they are catalysts for my poems. (As I am, for the most part, a reluctant traveler, I find this interesting. I will say that most of the postcards I purchase are in museum shops, and most of the weekly postcards I have published here have been images from my own small orbit–go figure!)
Section VII of Geranium Lake is devoted to the art form of photography.
(Photo: Leslie Schultz)
Sunday Postcard to the Past
Sited by Giotto, best viewed from the east,
as sun rises over the green-rimmed bowl
of Florentine hills, you, bell tower, stand
alone in your old, sacred precinctneighborhood,
lofty as spent granary, looming on the prairie,
or a rusting factory chimney. Sonic silo, housing
seven named bells, we climbed your four hundred
steps sometime in the last gone century.
It was early. We were happy, younger,
open to every view. You, campanile,
dressed in spumoni marble appliqué
without, were rough-hewn within: gritty, dim,
stronger than centuries or human life.
I remember–at each stage, as we climbed–
looking down through your center: your timbers
black as iron with age, your bells silent.
Leslie Schultz
This poem was originally written for National Poetry Month, on Earth Day in 2018, and was published on Winona Media. HERE is the original post–published with other photographs I took on that trip.
P.S. I once attended a Minnesota Humanitis Commission gathering in which Kenneth S. Brecher was the keynote speaker. He described his unusual memoir, in which he uses postcards from his collection to recall pivotal moments from his life, called Too Sad to Sing: AMemoir with Postcards (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, NYC, 1988.) My own copy is either in hiding or on the lam, but I recall this work with great affection. I believe it is currently out-of-print, but if it crosses your path, it is worth a look.
Minneapolis Museum of Art–Art in Bloom–Spring 2014 (Photo: Leslie Schultz)
The fifth section of Geranium Lake is filled with a long, nine-part poem that took me more than twenty years to complete. “Lady Tashat’s Mystery” began as a response to exploring the permanent collections of the Minneapolis Museum of Art. It evolved into an inquiry about what we, individually and collectively, chose to preserve and display, what effects that has, what it says about us. Museums–temples to the Muses–are very important to me. During the pandemic, I missed their closure more than the closure of restaurants or other public spaces. I find museums lively and stimulating. At the same time, whenever I am in a museum, I am keenly aware of the presences of those long dead, and, in a way, of how culture depends upon conversations with those long departed, upon questions of why the dead did as they did and made what they made–and what we continue to make of it all.
This particular “exhibit” raised more questions than I can answer, even after I spoke with a curator and did as much reseach as a lay person could do. Though I continue to wonder and ponder, I think now that there is no answer or, rather, the answer is simply the mystery of existence.
Below are the first two sections of the poem, and a glimpse of part of my amassed background information.
Lady Tashat’s Mystery
for Leo Luke Marcello
That which is hidden might be preserved.
One day it will come to light.
I. Reading the Bones
Under the desert sand,
Under the rock.
Behind the false door,
Behind the true.
Beneath two heavy lids
And two painted smiles,
Beneath the linen tapes
Stiff with unguent.
I am revealed.
I can tell no more.
But if my riddle begins to tap
Like an ibis bill
Inside your head,
Then you already have the map,
And I, though chill,
Am not utterly dead.
II. The Museum-Goer
The snows of Minneapolis are white as marble dust
and cut the nostrils like fragments of bad dreams.
The Institute, too, is white:
stone, a slippery mountain, behind the delicate tepees
pitched on a frozen lawn. Inside, treasures of
six continents lie in cold cases, on view.
I have been here before
to see the quilts of dead women
and the brushed smoke and sunlight of dead men.
Each time, I circle the Poet's Mountain
hewn from a single piece of bluish jade.
To one who looks closely, it is possible to see
drunken men winding up the side of a glassy mountain,
tottering unaware near precipices, over slender bridges,
their thin beards quavering with excitement. They are part
of a world as fragile and polished as the road they tread.
From a distance the mountain
looks like a heavy cloud or a dragon's blue egg. Do you
suppose the poets know this?
Do they think that if they get their words
just right the mountain might split open
with a clap of thunder?
If so, would this be praise?
May this be a day when you, too, enjoy grappliing with an unanswerable question! LESLIE
Reseach into the mystery of Lady Tashat (Photo: Leslie Schultz)Lady Tashat Cartonnage (Photo: Leslie Schultz)
