three poems maia penfold CRAZY CLYFFORD STILL unriddled the rocks his paintings like thunder eggs and onyx like fire and flame solidified caught held immobile and alive a wall of red fire with dark veins and clusters centered with white brighter than diamonds more rare more white more light the inferno still alive in the heart of it the heart pulse there and the raw desolation the cry the sheer air terror taken by the throat he would get on his knees for no man you get on your knees to them he said and you’ll walk on your knees for the rest of your life he lived in a cheap place with linoleum on the floor ARSHILE GORKY WAS HE THE ONE who hung himself in a barn with a necktie? or was it mark rothko? or was it both of them? i know franz kline ran into a tree on long island after the collector in the village bar said to him he would pay ten thousand a case of jack daniels and a triumph sports car for that painting he explained kline would drink the whiskey drive the car and kill himself the painting would be worth sixty thousand the day after the obituary and he the collector would have netted a profit of thirty thousand after having deducted the cost of the car and the whiskey that painting of gorky’s hangs in my mind and a small print of it from newsweek is scotchtaped to my bathroom wall it is made up of twinned lobes testicles buttocks and breasts a red plow runs through it on a field which is not the color of sky or the color of wheat the artists hand us messages from a zone of war messages that look like the entrails of pike and the parts of an aircraft assembly line but we have been inoculated with a virus that makes us turn their messages into nothing but money WHERE A WOMAN KEEPS HOUSE the air crisply clear milk in milk white jugs poured by a woman painted by vermeer a woman solid and strong keeps a good house an opulent bouquet tulips streaked orange and red flamboyant roses wide open and with fallen petals a soft explosion a lavishness the stems are not straight change direction like a woman who has loosened her beautiful clothes half undressed her soft fullness her dress slipping down laundry snapping on the line bellying in and out illustrations by tom cramer Poet Maia Penfold lives in Port Townsend, Washington, where she earns her living “baking granola and supervising developmentally disabled workers packaging bread at Port Townsend Baking Company.” Her first story in Clinton St. was “Por- pers,” Fall/Winter, 1988. Artist Tom Cramer lives in Portland. His vivid color totems and painted wood reliefs appear throughout the city, as do his psychidelicized VWs. He did our Winter ’86 cover image. Clinton St.—Spring 1990 17
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