LAYERS OF DISCOVERY

The things a good woman does

she does in a circle. From her point

in the east, she moves on. Later we see her

east again. It is her, not the same her—

but more fully her—and we know her.

Let’s unglue ourselves from time

and travel to a planet where every eye

sees four dimensions and all the moments last

forever. We see them side by side in line

like segments of a centipede.

The unstuck artist starts at X—

she draws, is drawn, by circle force

once more to X, the same yet not the same.

Australian rocks, lichen-orange again

in a gallery in Silver Spring, where

a fragile woman gussies up and waits

for boyfriends in her green high-back chair.

Somewhere down the line, at other points in time,

she’s breathless with her partner in the jitterbug

or sings a lullaby or coaxes a lover into bed.

I stretch to four dimensions

and find a frayed and knotted string

that winds from a pattern quilted purple

to a woman who melts into a bowl

into a woman into a bowl.

JoAnne Growney

Poem prompted by the artists and the artwork in the AGE OF DISCOVERY Exhibit at Gateway’s Heliport Gallery

January 2007

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