….
Turner’s Paintings of the Sea at Margate
for my mother
Were you that outline in the boat falling
into the horizon—an unspecified figure
blown loose by wind and wave, open
to interpretation or storm? Churning color,
lit from inside like regret, the way you
gave up painting and everything you loved.
The horizon dissolves in the thickened
layers of strokes, a streak of black
working its way across the middle
of the canvas. Storms, as if
one could become unassailable. Or
were you one of the figures of breeze
and light, walking the piers and beaches?
Here, but going somewhere else.
….
….
This poem is from the chapbook Not My First Walk on the Moon (Finishing Line Press) and is available at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/not-my-first-walk-on-the-moon-by-linda-hillman-chayes/ .
Not My First Walk on the Moon takes the reader on a journey through time and geographies. It moves through seasons and generations, through cityscapes, seashore, barrier islands, and backyards. The poems reflect on loss and how it reverberates throughout a lifetime including the tiny but continual losses of aging. They also celebrate moments of joy and awe inspired by breeze, light and love. Many of the poems use a framework of visual art and imagery—including a mother’s love of Turner’s Paintings of the Sea at Margate, a crime scene photo in which the facts fail to tell the story, and a portrait of a family leaving Rockaway beach in late afternoon. The moon slips in and out these poems but takes center stage in one as the author recalls watching the 1969 moon landing and imagines her very own walk on the “moon’s luminescent dustscape”.
Linda Hillman Chayes is a poet and psychoanalyst. Her work explores the ongoing process of knowing who we are in the context of our family’s stories (past and present) as well as our social and cultural environment. Her previous chapbook, The Lapse was published by Finishing Line Press in 2014, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kestrel, The American Poetry Journal, Quartet, The Westchester Review, 2 Horatio, The RavensPerch, The Wild Roof, Beyond Words, and other publications. She practices as a psychologist/psychoanalyst in New York City and Westchester County. She co-wrote and co-edited a book The Voice of the Analyst: Narratives in Developing a Psychoanalytic Identity published by Routledge Press in 2018.
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