Georgette Unis: Two Poems

​The Artists Circle

We paint landscapes
        of barren trees
        in tainted umber,
 
meet for coffee,
        talk of art
 
and how leaves do not grow
        in the winter soil of philosophies
        but rather along the arteries
                    of unfortunates.
 
We insist in strident tones
        of the over-caffeinated
        classical form,
                    color,
                    composition
                    and beauty
are chimeras,
        an apocalypse
        with a twist:
                    those horses divine
                    their own undoing.
 
When amber spirits
        soothe our rhetoric,
        we accept the golden mean
                    as our gift to each other
 
before the moon rises
        and loneliness
                    dims our mirth.

---

The Process
​
It grows by the minute,
the trash bag nearly
too heavy to lift as it bulges
with discarded slides,
those pieces of celluloid
in plastic frames, or cardboard
which is the better choice
upon which to list
artist-title-medium-size,
since labels peel, jam the projector,
another item we no longer need
in today’s technology of computers
and the ephemeral storage of images.
 
The discards click
like an old newsreel
of my past artworks.
The memory rolls out
how strong my fingers were,
my hands thick with muscle
from the energy I worked
into clay or onto canvas.
 
And the many photographers
I hired, each with a particular style;
one serious about his work,
another with a roguish smile,
preferred payment in artwork.
But one especially dear,
the mother of nine children.
I marveled how she maneuvered
her heavy camera bags, lights,
umbrellas and stands upstairs
to my studio, photograph work
with such attentive care.
She already understood
our creations were to be savored,
documented, and with grace,
allowed to leave.

---

Georgette Unis is the author of Tremors, a chapbook of poems published by Finishing Line Press, 2018. Her poetry is published in several literary journals, most recently in Naugatuck River Review, San Pedro River Poetry Review and Southwestern American Literature. She is also a painter with multiple solo and group exhibitions, some of which present broadsides of her poems.