Collaborative Creature

”Greater than the sum of its parts”…the flower of collaboration. Co-creation is its own animal. The poem below was aroused and lifted out of my painting The Calling by the honed articulate pen of poet Amy Trussell. We paired up and put together a book of her words and my images titled “The Painted Tongue Flowers” (for which we are seeking publication). Many of the poems grew from her immersion into my paintings. She pulled so much out of my images of which I had no conception when I painted them that I was blown away. The evocative language that emerged inspired me to use her poetry as a springboard into some new narratives, style and execution. Bursting milkweed pods, ground cherries and rushes, ascending cranes and Erzulie herself appeared like visitors from her internal world. This overlapping of layers, of my visual and her lingual, revealed a third essence shining through that has proven unexpectedly and exquisitely pleasing.

The Calling

She hears the cries of the women in peril
and her hand reaches back to the time
when all was embryonic
and she arose from the middle of a pool of calm.
She can feel the distress of oysters and egrets
ruined and covered in oil
and predict where a pearl, black or white,
will light from beneath the skin.
We are layered up in mud and the wreckage of possession
and she waits on the sand in flamingo expectancy.
Now half of the seafood shacks are washed away
and the shrimp boats are on their sides
or smashed in the pine trees,
the camellia and crepe myrtle in ruins
and the children’s rooms full of standing water.
Even the beds are underwater
where the mothers and fathers used to read
WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE.
But she hears the tears and the dreams of children
and will guide those who will incarnate again
Their perfect embryonic stages:
the tail and gills falling away,
emerging as water lilies from the mud.
She oversees the architects who use material and designs
that mimic the lotus flower
and raise buildings that stay clean against all odds.
When the sky is brown and the water big and muddy
in Sri Lanka, Cuba, Biloxi
she is the black Madonna found upright in the rubble.
And when a pinwheel forms on the weather map
she is large enough to take it into her
along with the quick and the dying
in the pink and green garden in her breast.

Picture: Painting "The Calling" by me. Poem by Amy Trussell