2007 - Vol. 4, Issue 6

My heart leapt when I saw the ad: the first–ever exhibit of Gustav Klimt landscapes was coming to a gallery in the Berkshire Mountains. Although I've never connected to Klimt's decorative paintings — The Kiss being the most widely recognized — his landscapes have beckoned since I discovered them three years ago.

How would I get there? My chronic fatigue syndrome renders travel a tricky transaction. Even a three–hour trip from Connecticut to Williamstown, Massachusetts (the gallery site), requires "cost–benefit analysis." On any given day, I have so much energy to "spend," and the amount I have in "cash" floats as mystically as the dollar against the yen. And speaking of cash, I would need an influx of that, too, for hotel, gas, meals.

If you must be tortured
you ought to be talented.
Madness per se is not attractive —
pissing yourself, babbling,
screaming, afraid
of the window, the voices

Drags her foot, languid, with a stutter,
ankle sweeps the ground, a little vibrato on the toe
and she dances, her fingers float up, her chin down.

If you catch her carefully on the marley,
handbreadth beneath her left subscapularis,
your weight hangs in the balance.

When I couldn't sculpt a bust
of my dog, let alone, my sister's
face, you turned into a thunderbolt.

Shame stung me, like a jellyfish,
when you, with your wise hands,
slapped my face with the cold clay.