TONIGHT I WISH FOR DEER - for my parents
ALSO BY ANN IVERSON
Come Now to the Window (2003)
Definite Space (2007)
THE AUTHOR WOULD LIKE TO THANK THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE AND PUBLICATIONS:
A very special thanks to Kirsten Dierking in her visions for seeing the poems within this book form a whole, also to Theresa Boyer, Carol Bjorlie, Janet Jerve, Marie Rickmyer, Kathy Weihe, and Liz Weir, all who help keep poetry in my life.
The painting in the author’s photograph was recently installed at the University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital.
“Into All Things We Enter” was inspired by a photograph of Lake Superior by Dr. Ted Gundel
“Alms” and “Storm,” Talking Stick, 2004
“Myopic Vision,” Dos Passos Review, 2005
“Poppies,” Trillium Literary Journal, 2007
“Wheat Field With Crows,” Asphalt Sky, 2008
“Afraid to Sleep and Then Afraid to Wake,” and “Today the World is Beautiful,” The Taste of Permanence, 2008
“At the Foot of the Ozark Mountains,” Thanalonline Journal, 2008 and The Journal of World Culture and Literature, 2011
“The Four O’clock Hour,” Pilgrimage 2008
“Love,” “Sunflowers,” “After Painting,” and “Solstice Nearing,”
Relief Magazine, 2008
“Art Lesson II,” Midway Journal, 2008
“In Every Minute of Every Hour of Every Day,”
The Wind Blows, the Ice Breaks: Poems of Loss and Renewal by Minnesota Poets, 2010
“Landscapes,” The Saint Paul Almanac, 2010
“All These Butterflies,” “Reckless,” “The Great Blue Heron,” “To Know a Snow Angel,” The Quiet Eye, 2010
The poems listed below were written in response to large paintings of the same title created by the author for her art exhibit Speaking Image at the Undercroft Gallery, St. Mathew’s Episcopal Church, April 2007. They also were published along with the painting in Trillium Literary Journal, 2008:
“Reckless,” “Together in the World,” “Achilles Heal,” “Moons of Jupiter,”
“Ladders to the Sun,” and “Flowers for Daddy”
FOR MY SISTERS:
JEANNIE, CLAUDIA, MARGIE, MARY
FIRST LESSON
There is nothing more artistic than to love others.
VINCENT VAN GOGH
SUNFLOWERS
Oil on Canvas, 1888
VINCENT VAN GOGH
In 5th grade, the teacher handed out a brochure from which to order prints of the classics for 99 cents. My mother ordered several, among them your Sunflowers, perhaps why we have these conversations.
Even in the print, the impasto was quite evident.
Though just 11 years old, I thought the vase
of the half way dying giants a bit peculiar, almost scary
like the tangling monsters in bad dreams.
But their floppy, golden heads made her happy,
and it made me happy to dutifully carry home
a new print every month in its tubular container
that we opened together on the kitchen table.
You painted them for Gauguin, who never made you happy,
but the Sunflowers must have spoken to you of a life free of torment, one of complete elation, a life where yellow holds the brush and the eyes of life and death are equal in their beauty.
And Gauguin painted you painting them
as though the two of you followed in a circle
those nine autumn weeks in and out
of the yellow house in Arles
until the tragic took the canvas over.
I remember them in the living room
in their great oak frame she bought at the Salvation Army,
then
