Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Tuesday poem #199 : Klara du Plessis : The poem is its own portrait



Two egg yolks
quivering in the icebox.
Kinesthetic swag
gold coins
kept together by the thinnest
of film.
Fertile artifacts
two little dots slightly gelatinous
at this point, prick to see
thick yellow nutrition
bulge a drop from the wound.

This way they keep
for a day or two, freshness is key
to art, panting, lapping up
paint with full nouns
like an adult.

Can albumin bleach
the translucent leak
from shaking separation
back and forth plopping
into halved shells, porous white
in a bowl and then the yellows
kept intact for now.
If quick-tempered
the shells are a light way of cracking.
Method acting
your way through life.

Tempera is a technique to paint
with pigments
powders, powder the cheeks
to fill in the blanks of dermis,
powders mixed with yolks
to form a consistency
that endures.
Application has a drier
sheen than oils
a hard shellac
but a fecund being.
Imagine painting in
reproductive cell tissue
ovum mother.
The embryo hidden in a yellow halo
is just another product
of modification, mindless protein
leveled across the canvas
like an insult
to all the babies relaxed
into existence.



Klara du Plessis [photo credit: Brian Campbell] is a poet and critic residing alternately in Montreal and Cape Town. Her chapbook, Wax Lyrical, was released from Anstruther Press, 2015, and a full-length collection of multilingual poems is forthcoming from Palimpsest Press. She curates the monthly, Montreal-based Resonance Reading Series, and writes reviews and essays for Broken Pencil Magazine, The Montreal Review of Books, The Rusty Toque and other journals. Follow her on Twitter @ToMakePoesis

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

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