What Joan and Marie tell me
After “Merci” (oil on canvas, 1992), one of Joan Mitchell’s latest works before she succumbed to cancer in October of the same year.
Joan only paints the trees
and I can’t find any of them in “Merci.”
Marie tells me all art is in the present tense
and I don’t see the trees here but at least their blue weight
pulls us, me, Joan, Marie, back into the earth.
Here on Earth I’ve understood nothing
about the change in weather. Love tells me
about the thoughts of clouds before
they split themselves open and I laugh
like I’ve heard a bad joke, laugh despite
myself and despite the darkened view of the trees.
I blink and they split again, spilling blue.
Blue spilled is nothing to cry over, Joan tries to tell me.
The right side clenched, I have spent all day bracing myself.
Potential energy is almost happening, Love says.
What I want is tenderness and violence happening at once,
to sit at Marie’s table, to swallow Joan’s drink.
What does my lack of urgency say
about my gratitude? As she died, Joan was frantic in hers;
she had so little time left to thank the trees.
Did she think of each one? I think of her
tossing orange by the fistful thinking
of the impossibility of them, the sheer number
of their gifts. I am unable
to begin thanking and so I won’t.
I’ll reach back into myself instead with the blue and
slithering, slick globs of white gratitude.
This is the writing I do
before I die, and because I die.
Mayzie Sattler (she/her) is a poet from Upstate New York. She is a second year MFA candidate at Sarah Lawrence College, where she serves as Poetry Editor for Lumina Journal and teaches for The Writing Institute. Mayzie has worked for Black Ocean and the Southampton Review, and is currently an intern for Black Lawrence Press. Her poems have appeared in Coffin Bell Journal and WILDsound Writing Festival. She currently lives, works and studies in Yonkers, NY.
Image: Joan Mitchell, “Merci”
