www.barbaracohenibclc.com

www.barbaracohenibclc.com

Christof

Pub

Just finished this one. Oil on canvas, 8x10. I'm giving it to a friend.

Two Portraits

Here are two new portraits I've done in my painting class:

Paintings and Poems

Here's some recent oil paintings and poems:


SoHo


Furling


Cafe


Old World


Row Boat, Morning


Martha's Vineyard


Monument


Pink granite moment—
what we went to,
my dog, my God and me

yesterday, yes, today, too,
chasing sticks, sticking
to the road, the south,
and where it went

through Mount Saint Mary’s
so as not to desecrate
so as to stay in shade.

Graveyards have
lease laws, not
leash laws,
and besides
I carry a little body bag.

But hold it, the moment—
granite, pink,
when I saw my grandparents’ stone,
my dog and me
no longer alone
because my mother
had driven there

—my mother, the survivor,
breast and bladder,
rather not talk about that—

to check on the flowers she’d left,
to touch the last name,
to—I don’t know?—show me

the names on the slab’s other side,
hers and my father’s,
chiseled already,
just the dates
waiting.


Ovens

“I see the killer in him
and he turns on an oven,
an oven, an oven, an oven….”
—Anne Sexton


Hot boxes, wire-tiered
and dark, slow-glow
electric or four blue
cities of flames on top,

and names like Amana
and Sharp. Most of them
windowed thick, Cyclopic,
mastermind with a master

plot, and something always
a little off of ON or OFF
—the dial nudged, the hiss
of gas, a clock that forgets

to speak up. Mostly the jaw
drops with a breath of heat
to deliver the leg of lamb,
the roast of beef—all juicy

and hot. But sometimes
it does not. A crock cracks,
a casserole bleeds out,
Easy-Off poisons the house.

A cockroach cooks. Or a mouse.
There was Plath in her flat
on Primrose Hill with her poems
and her pills and her doubt.

And years before that, all over
Poland the strange smell
and the cough. God, God,
God, turn the dial to Off.

The absent blogger

Have I really been uninspired since mid-May? No. Just enjoying life too much to have time to post about it, I guess. But since I'm going to be on the Cape for a week writing and WiFi-ing, it's probably a good time to resume.

Haven't written much this summer -- two poems, only one of which is even worth posting. I plan to workshop it in Provincetown next week. Get it ship-shape. Here's the draft:

Conch


Between the rolling sheets of low-tide foam
     I find it—this prize I’ve tried for
          all week.

No crab claw, as first I thought, but a bone-
     white tube, like paper curled,
          and when I pull

it’s as though the sand pulls back. I pluck it,
     a giant tooth from the mouth
          of the beach,

tip it like an urn and a drab grout weeps
     from the orange spout.
          Now it’s a trumpet

clogged with a flat black foot, rough as fine-grit,
     and gray meat which when I touch it
          puckers, vaguely erotic.

I know she’ll love it, will smile when I take it
     from behind my back, this living
          offering.

I know I will have to kill it, too. Already
     I’m imagining the clickclickclick,
          the blue tongues,

the pot and the water and the silent scream
     that is part of the taking
          requisite to giving.

Don’t we each wrench the wild out of the other,
     if only to hold up to the light
          our own base origins?

When I pry out the animal it will drop in the sink
     with a sloppy thud, and we’ll have
          the empty shell,

the potential music. Later, we’ll soak it in a bucket
     of bleach, scrub it clean for the bookcase
          or the mantelpiece.

Tomorrow I’ll wade in the surf searching
     for another. To make a pair.
          One for each of us.


I've also been painting -- spill-over from my oil painting class at the 92nd Street Y. Very amateur, but something:








Next post from P-town.

My new chapbook

After the Drowning, my latest poetry chapbook, is coming out this summer from Finishing Line Press, and currently accepting pre-publication orders. Support your local poet! Buy a copy!

www.finishinglinepress.com

Click on "2006 New Releases"