Edythe Haendel Schwartz
with a book release reading for A Palette of Leaves
Monday, Jan. 7 at 7:30 PM
Sacramento Poetry Center
1719 25th Street
Host: Bob Stanley
Edythe Haendel Schwartz is the author of a full length poetry collection, A Palette of Leaves, Mayapple Press, 2012, www.mayapplepress.com <http://www.mayapplepress.com> and a chapbook, Exposure, Finishing Line Press, 2007, www.finishinglinepress.com <http://www.finishinglinepress.com> . Her poems appear widely in journals and anthologies, including Calyx, Cave Wall, California Quarterly, PMS, Poetica, Natural Bridge, Earth’s Daughters, Poet Lore, Pearl, Sierra Nevada Review, Persimmon Tree, Potomac Review, JAMA, Hawaii Pacific Review, Vermont Literary Review, Cider Press Review, Runes, Spillway, Thema, and Water-Stone, among others. In 2012, Edythe’s poem “A Natural Phenomenon” won first prize in the Friends of Acadia Poetry Competition. Other awards include Persimmon Tree’s 2011 Western States Poetry Competition for “Resist,” and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for poems on the Jewish experience, for “Exposure.” In 2006 and 2008, Edythe was awarded writer’s grants for residencies at The Vermont Studio Center. Now retired from the faculty of the Department of Child Development, California State University, Sacramento, Edythe is a visual artist as well as a poet. She lives with her husband, Sy, in Davis, CA, where she swims with the Davis Aquatic Masters and dances with Pamela Trokanski’s Dance Workshop’s Second Wind group.
Alice Neel Paints Futility of Effort
Oil on canvas, 1930
I’ve drawn the small figure in meager space,
in lost light, colorless, her face
twisted, her head caught
between the bed posts.
I read about it in the paper–
her mother was in the kitchen
ironing. I’ve drawn a hanging
line, a fragile vertical
to slice the canvas, the girl
strangled by chance
the way my daughter was.
Diptheria took her,
the white threads webbing her
throat, choking off air. No care
could cut the fever, care no weapon
against the viscous membrane. A brush
of fate so fast and dark, lamp black, ochre
and in a corner hovering, one eye
a paralyzing stare, no eye
to see, and where her
mouth would be, no breath
to draw.
From Behind the Pane I Watch Her
shinny up the beech,
no sound but the soft crack of branch
where her kite is caught. Feet
trust the bough will not break when she frees
the tail, unknots the line. How swiftly
fingers ease the twine, release the snag; the agony
is mine alone. Dusk. So hard to see
where tree becomes child or child becomes tree.
My Father’s Pipe
A little yellow to warm the bowl, the teacher said.
I drew my father’s pipe, image and ground a web
of prismacolor: carmine, raw umber. A little yellow–
that hue I could not swallow
sallow as my father’s skin, though his beloved
pipe was not his Lucifer– radiation that, White
Sands, white light, sun disk, fireball tongued
with glister, incandescence in the Tularosa–
uranium, unleashed. I filled my father’s pipe
with burnt sienna, ignited flakes viridian
and copper, saw the plume– mind’s eye
flash on rod and cone, feathers of fume
rising in the ether, augury unknown, shadow
on a scan the body’s residue of that false dawn–
the marrow making no more red, the puking
in a hospital bowl. A little yellow to warm
the bowl the teacher said. I drew as if the sun
might fail to rise one day, the earth drawn
into a black hole; my fingers measure
my father’s time, the right hue out of reach.
