Green
After Jasper John’s Green Target
1955, Encaustic on newspaper and cloth over canvas, 60 x 60 inches, MoMA, New York; https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78401
Green hears me singing the blues and intervenes. She follows me into my dreams posing as curtain, as cycle, as movie star. She offers a bottle of herself, mint julep. Smitten, I am, and swamp haze. Until I come upon my fear of the snake in her. Of the lizard tail she can release and leave dangling in my grasp. Spiraling her concentric swirls around my wrist, I cogitate heartbeat and conception. In retrospect, she remains forever at my childhood side; protean, pliable, and perfectly plausible. When I break away to pursue my other love — blue — she reminds me I can simply add the yolk of sun to summon her return. Now if I can learn to omit fear from my life, I’ll be young again, full of bull’s-eye & whirligig.
Originally published in Tinderbox Literary Journal, appears in Karen’s poetry book PURSUIT (Kelsay Press, 2019).
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Karen Neuberg is a Brooklyn-based poet. Her latest book is Pursuit (Kelsay Press, 2019). She is also the author of the chapbooks the elephants are asking (Glass Lyre, 2017), Myself Taking Stage (Finishing Line, 2014), and Detailed Still (Poets Wear Prada, 2009). She is associate editor of the online poetry journal, First Literary Review-East. Her poems and collages can be found in numerous publications including 805, Canary, New Verse News, and Verse Daily.
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