Susanna Lang

Mornings I lean out

my top-floor window

head in the clouds

urgent wings, swirling

calls, jackdaws

* * *

Ossip Zadkine was a medic during the first world war, always an artist. I imagine him carrying a sketch pad in his uniform, and a stubby pencil. This etching, a memory: stretcher-bearers who hold out their hands to a soldier lying on the ground, too still

* * *

The cloister in Arles. Angels, wings up-lifted, reach from the old stone toward the one below who will soon join them, traveling across an immense distance

* * *

Swifts pass over the bridge at Collias

pass under

white bellies flashing beneath dark wings

whist-whistle-lilt

unremitting

unrepentant

* * *

Mornings the jackdaws

gather the daylight

scatter to the fields

soil freshly turned,

invitation to the feast

* * *

At three years old, Hendrick Goltzius suffered a severe burn to his right hand. It did not keep him from becoming an engraver, etching the usual gods and saints but also the portrait of his own injured hand. In this study his hand, meticulously observed, holds a burin. As if the fire had

released something he might not otherwise have found in himself. As if the fire still haloed his flesh

* * *

Evenings the swifts

pass back and forth

as clouds move in

No reason to rest

nothing to repent

* * *

Paula Modersohn-Becker painted a young girl looking out from the canvas, eyes and mouth quiet, fingers spread across the yoke of her patterned dress. Blessing herself

* * *

Burn hand

cripple hand

wings of flame