Javelins
Artfully arranged arrows
engorge hidden quivers
she carries, everywhere
she goes. Each day registers
as a clarion call to the
hunt. Javelins are squirreled
away for special hunt
days. The self-generated mystique
of the girl warrior magus
makes others nervous.
What makes it onto
canvas— Spanish-colored visions
of child-like
dilapidation, children blankly born into
the special dwarf dodo
dance the human race does— takes,
transcendentalizes
violence into a vision quest for the most
morose human truth,
tripping eyes into realizations of
deep, absurd diminutions.
This is a woman unused to
conventions, around that
word (love) which cannot appear
in her paintings,
themselves sharp like javelins. Her eyes
cannot be anything but
green, but her carnivore streak is pure earth.
I cannot deign to speak
of where, how, why she was raised,
except to say that what
was needy in her crystallized as
her most precious asset.
The child in her cannot die.
That the special
circumstance is not a coincidence—
the analogous morose days
I spent in Bethesda in my
own childhood, dragged
unwillingly by those I
had no idea were
adversaries into a matrix, corrupt
in its tininess, lying in
all directions to cover up
stunted, blunt motives—
can remain in the grave
where it belongs. It’s
all too sad. But transmuting
sadness into anger, anger
into representational panache,
is what this Diana does
best. She, too, would look
ravishing at the center
of the Great Stair Hall.
And could laugh, here and
there, at the whole thing. Between shots.
Adam Fieled is a poet based in Philadelphia. Recent releases include the re-release of three Argotist Online e-books: Mother Earth (2011), The Posit Trilogy (2017), and The Great Recession (2019). A magna cum laude Penn grad, he edits P.F.S. Post.