***
Titled ‘Branches’.
It makes you look and look some more.
A jungle of signs,
A line path of cranes over the sky sucks my eye,
In the twists of the trees,
in the stormy clouds,
they have something brooding,
that would have appealed to Bely or Goethe,
not the sun of Italy but the range of beige grays –
the rains of northern marshlands.
In these meetings of curving channels,
Dune-phalangees and beetroots,
you get the portrait of Flanders:
Long piano fingers and wrinkles,
Yet still full of tender purpose,
The forest map on the skin,
So gorgeous and yet so hard-won,
Shows the tension beneath the calm.
Could they be evocations of someone’s garden
with its wild fruit arcs?
The veils of green veins
Lay many trails and second thoughts,
Dozens of faint cross cracks,
A tree bark –
the fingertips bear the wood circles,
Distantly, I hear the branches soughing
and a faint birdsong.
A portrait called ‘Branches’:
Quite beautiful in its own right,
Just like trees hands can’t help being not musical…
*Painting “Cranes” by Sara Maino, 2024