Of Their Own Accord

I am still thinking about the contrast between live people and quiescent art in museums. 

Here is another example from our visit to the Anderson Collection at Stanford yesterday.

I have recently become very interested in a poet new to me, Jean Pedrick.

I'll tell you more about this soon. The one below is from her chapbook,

The Gaudy Book.. Each poem in this book has an epigraph

from Dorothy Sayer's book, Gaudy Night; in this case the epigraph

seems part of the larger structure, and confusing outside the context of the book, 

 so I am not including it here.

17

Making the kind of bower I needed

once for a one-armed doll and a lumped

clown and a blue-eyed bear

I crushed some fragile things my grandma

cherished under the shrubs.

She asked had I trampled her Blumchens.

I said I did not trample.

I have not told a lie since, willingly.

                  But a vow, a covenant, broken

                  is a lie? But if it has gone

                  from the inside breaking like reeds

                  it is not a lie, only a death?

I built a bower. I do not trample.

Blumchens come up again of their own accord.

Jean Pedrick

The Gaudy Book, Juniper Press, La Crosse, WI, 1979, n.p.