I invite you to share in a memory of mine from my younger years. I’m in Verona at an art gallery, carrying a notebook in which I write fragments of poems and miscellany thoughts. After milling about for a few hours, I find my way into the modern art section, and come across a striking painting of a man with what I remember as a bloodied eye, looking anguished. The painting arrests me. When I look at the title, it is Waiting for Godot—a play with a similarly arresting power. I sit down on the floor of the gallery, examining the painting from a safe distance and writing in my notebook while Italian security guards snicker at this strange, floored, Canadian. There’s me: writing a poem in response to a painting in response to a play.
I mention the anecdote because poetry-ifying visual arts was one of my main tactics as a budding writer and in Stephanie Bolster’s Two Bowls of Milk, we see the practice playing out by a similar, albeit more capable hand. Two Bowls of Milk is a collection of poetry that, like many collections, comes in multiple parts. The first section of the collection is more rooted in experience, particularly rural experiences, while the back half of the collection is in direct response to artworks, which are cited under the titles of poems.
Bolster maintains a lush descriptiveness that feels philosophically resonant, exploring the idea of perspective. She starts early with untitled the poem opening the section “Come to the Edge”, in which she invites the reader: “Come to the edge of the barn the property really begins there, / you see things defining themselves, the hoofprints left by sheep, / the slope of the roof, each feather against each feather on each goose. / You see the stake with the flap of orange plastic that marks // the beginning of real” (3). I appreciate this early invitation from the haze into something more defined, and the positioning of realness as the precise details. Important to note is that the things define “themselves,” giving agency to the inanimate. The poem continues with a rationale for the reality”: “I’m showing you this because / I’m suck of the way you clutch the darkness with your hands, / seek invisible fenceposts for guidance, accost spectres” (3). The poem has a grounding effect in the material rather than the abstract, while still providing that hint of a sort of “great beyond” of inspiration. It makes me think of an engraving I once saw of someone, bent over, looking “beyond the veil,” which to me looked like someone awaiting the sting of the guillotine. This trip into the real is not without its need for caution, as the poem’s speaker notes: “I’m coming with you because I fear you’ll trip // over the string that marks the beginning, you’ll lie across the border / and with that view — fields of intricate grain and chiselled mountains, / cold winds already lifting the hairs of your arm—you’ll forget your feet, / numb in straw and indefinite dung, and be unable to rise, to walk farther” (3). There guide has a gentleness that I quite appreciate, noting the danger but offering the guidance to avoid it. The poem weaves together the philosophical project: bringing the abstract into realness while also maintaining the allusiveness to something more significant and resonant. The poem ends with the following stanzas:
My fingers weave so close between yours because I’ve been there
before, I know the relief of everything, how it eases the mind to learn
shapes it hasn’t made, how it eases the feet to know the ground
will persist. See those two bowls of milk, just there,
on the other side of the property line, they’re for the cats
that sometimes cross over and are seized by a thirst, they’re
to wash your hands in. Lick each finger afterwards. That will be
your first taste, and my finger tracing your lips will be the second. (3)
There’s a suggestiveness in the final lines, pairing this idea of revealing the real with a charged intimacy. What I like best, though, is the line about “how it eases the mind to learn / shapes it hasn’t made” (3). I feel as though that’s critical to Bolster’s project here. There’s an attentiveness to the details, a commitment to learning things that did not originate with us. I once wrote an essay about the ethics of attention posited in the short works of Samuel Beckett—funny how that motif returns to me again.
With this kind of care and attention, Bolster offers some short reflections on “Assorted Flora” and about the “Iris,” she writes,
Your spine is a secret grief.
Rooted in inconstant mud,
you managed to stand, proud
though purple marks the perfect
white of your throat.
But cut, left
alone in a vase, you will lean
away from light, shrink
into your crippled shadow. (8)
The imagistic nature of the work draws on the specific details of the flower and elevates it, though I’m not sure elevates is the right word—humanizes might be more a propos. The personification of the iris with “the perfect / white of [its] throat” and the idea of shrinking away into a shadow, away from the light, gives the flower a human quality. It’s a charming observational moment of identification.
The imagistic nature of the poems reminds me of William Carlos Williams, particularly in this section of “Poems For the Flood,” a poem that is comprised of several vignettes:
Watering the garden, I call the earth thirsty
and then cringe at what I’ve said. The way things are
is simpler and more difficult to understand. My throat
and the columbines open for the same water differently.
Closed rose petals, a sky not scrawled with cloud,
the small of the back, these are lesser. Beauty is the red
rectangle of a barn surrounded by flood.
The white chicken on the rooftop testing its wings. (17)
Maybe it’s the white chickens and the redness of the barn. I appreciate what Bolster adds to the imagery by having the connections between humans and plants: “My throat / and the columbines open for the same water differently.”
The back half of the collection is focused on responding to artworks. One poem that stands out to me in that regard is “Still Life With Braid,” which is given the subtitle for the artwork “Female Dissected Body, Seen From the Back, Gerard de Lairess, 1685. Engraving with etching.” The poem has a more narrative-driven impulse, introducing a kind of relationship between two characters: “I loved her when we washed our hands / in matching sinks at school” (55). The specificity of the moment stands out to me and then it continues with an excellent set of lines: “She feared the cubicles / where a raincoat with a man in it might stand / on a toilet’s rim awaiting us, pocket knife // tight in his fist” (55). The ominousness of the moment is finely delivered. I think what I like best is the way the line “She feared the cubicles” is given a line break that creates meaning on its own but then is doubled up with the lines which follow. The poem continues with the disappearance of the girl with the teacher reassuring the speaker that she’s just camping. Finally, the central character’s “letter slot released / a drawing of an iris, pencilled throat open, bulb / engorged beneath” (55). She continues, “Veins so intricately etched / they stung the purple in my wrists. No hand but hers // had done it” (55). The narrator flashes forward where “Time passed / until [she] visited a gallery and ticking stopped / before her adult portrait: wrists resplendent, raw / in bracelets of taut rope” (55). The narrator sees her childhood friend’s gestures replicated in the image where her posture “peeled to reveal her braided spine” (55). The final description is such a haunting one that reminds me of a philosophy book I read about the female form last year:
skin draped
her waist, was pinned aside like coy sleeves fitted
to her upper arms. The alphabet named her
crucial points but not that curl she’d tucked
behind her ear at eight. Her face averted, ashamed
at believing its body worth this spectacle of death.
Why did I not tell her she was more than this? I am
no more myself: bones pitched inside a tent of skin;
fear; one bound hand and the other binding. (55-56)
The description is so rich and evocative of their bond and seems to tell a story in just a few short, rich sentences. There’s a notion of what is invisible to others re-emerging, or at least being perceived, seemingly by nobody else. It’s a fantastic conclusion to an entire story, told within two pages.
Of course, the challenge of a collection like this is that, sometimes, without the reference images, the poems don’t really land in the same way. The challenge of responding to art with another art form is that you’re both adding and subtracting at once. You’re adding a layer of interpretation, but potentially subtracting from your own work by relying on your references. It’s a fine line to walk that has the potential to make your work shine but also to limit your audience. At the very least it places some demands on the reader to conduct additional research.
Overall, I quite liked Two Bowls of Milk. It had a lot of great poetry in it, which sounds like an odd thing to say, although I do think it encapsulates the spirit of perception that gives poetry its ethical and aesthetic force.
Happy reading!
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