Somebody Asked

if I would post a poem of mine this month, and I just realized I've been putting it off long enough that I'm about to run out of month (oops). So here. It's older (2003), but it won this little ekphrastic writing thingy at the U. Anyway--


Cynthia in the Bedroom


is dreaming again--a lover's mouth
pressed to her knee, bedclothes' green

velvet rustle. In the next room
a record needle slips, slips, forgotten.

It has been snowing for hours.
In her healing dream, Cynthia herself

is a painter--Spotted Horse Mural,
Meditation on a Woman Bathing

hang in her grown son's apartment
years after her death. In the lamplight

she is perfect, elegant face painted
into the hair's dark frame.

How she wants to be remembered
this way, before cancer's compromise.

Lips almost parted, throat rising.
On the nightstand a single, vibrant

flower's jealous heart.

[based on Cynthia in the Bedroom, a painting by Tom Wesselmann, 1981]