The VANISHING POINT
by Carol Hamilton
Finalist Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest (2004)
ISBN 1-930907--57-5
40 pgs., $7
Conversation by a Lake
This grass of one sheath,
a green neatness,
Art Deco dancing
on stirred air.
The scant and spiky leaves
tremble and the head nods
all alone. It alone
nods its tales of first green
and lost green and all the years
the thought of green was ever held,
sings all the dreams green
ever dreamed and told.
Frontality
Why did he use that word?
The flat Egyptians wanted it all,
this life and the next,
side view, top view, front view
pressed out to a decorative
fringe around the day to day.But the blue hippos are round-hipped,
substantial, and tiny Thoth,
the god of writing, is delicately
3-D. Painting was the problem,
or mosaics, frescoes. They require
a different way to tell the truth.Still, for all their care, one hand
pressed into the wall, the tomb, the page,
the other flat palm forward,
defenseless, open, it all looks like
a pretty lie. Instead, cat, I touch your fur,
you rub me with your scent of now.
Giotto’s Frescoes
I am caught up in his ancient dance
on a stage suspended between earth
and heaven, this place of rich folds
and fuzzy-edged angels’ skirts,
of angels and agony,
the vulnerable feet of Christ,
how he tried to plant those feet
on earth, yet there is more
of levitation here than gravity.
His world captivates
where blue shows through
and even blue flakes off.
From him comes only something human,
some striving. Boccaccio said
He returned to Florence,
by the high road, his clothes all dirty.
Padua, Florence, Assisi,
there birds sing and angels weep.
Carol Hamilton is a writer, storyteller, and former elementary school teacher and university professor who lives in Midwest City, Oklahoma. She was Poet Laureate of Oklahoma (1995-1997) and received the Oklahoma Book Award for poetry for Once The Dust, a Southwest Book Award in 1988 for a children’s novel, The Dawn Seekers and a Cherubim Award for another children’s novel, The Mystery Of Black Mesa. Other published books are, Legends Of Poland, Legerdemain (Oklahoma Book Award Finalist), Deserts, Dry Places And Other Aridities, and Daring The Wind. New books include: Breaking Bread, Breaking Silence (Winner of the Chiron Review Chapbook Contest); Gold: Greatest Hits (from Pudding House Invitational Series); I, People Of The Llano (Good SAMARitan Press), and a children’s novel, I’m Not From Neptune. Her avocation is translating at a medical clinic and for medical groups working in Spanish-speaking countries.