by Jeanne Julian
I’m not quite qualified to portray
pain, in the abstract. Or as landscape.
Never knew war, starvation, childbirth.
My study is only a still life.
Give birth, we say, gift
I never gave. But when lying
on the table, my knees up
and bent over a bolster,
struggling against disused muscles
and a damaged knee to thrust, force,
my leg out straight against pain sharp
as glass shards and the physical
therapist gives me midwifely mantras
like good work and one more,
I start laughing, dare to declare
this is like giving birth.
Sometimes I joke about giving
his biography the title Landscape of Pain.
Imagine: affliction his daily view, as if
from your kitchen window you’d see
a varied, stunted prospect: sluggish swamps,
stone-riddled weed-choked fields, stark trunks
of burnt forests. His burden a gift: the painful
process of draining, clearing, replanting.
Landscapes more lovely give his household
grace: his artist wife forages in nature,
transforms quarry stones, wildflowers
and kitchen scraps into pigment, giving
luster to wide spans of canvas: radiant leaves,
birches in snow, ferns bent over logs beside
a vernal pool. These she generates in
the confines of the tiny cabin they share,
small as a shanty but vibrant and warm.
Of course, dimensions of a house
are not the measure of the comfort
of a home, just as landscapes
can be grand, or scant—a garden patch.
And perhaps a small dose of pain does
give, permit, a singular perspective.
Little births happening all the time.
***
Jeanne Julian is author of Like the O in Hope and two chapbooks. Her poems are in Kakalak, Panoply, RavensPerch, Gyroscope, Silkworm, and elsewhere, and have won awards from Reed Magazine, Comstock Review, and Naugatuck River Review. She lives in Maine and reviews books for The Main Street Rag. www.jeannejulian.com
Cypress Review 