"'Graceland' in the Style of Thomas Cole" and "Joan Didion at the Getty Center"
By Michael Mintrom
“Graceland” in the Style of Thomas Cole Cirrus notes on blue sky. It’s morning in America. The shadows are long but gold light infuses the whole scene. In the foreground, across the lower region, an escarpment rises from a river. And there, on a promontory, sits the mansion. You could mistake it for a Greek temple. Crowned in sunlight, shuffling off-center, it’s balanced by a grassy knoll twisting into the painting’s edge. Mauve mountains stomp in a row, snowless in the distance. We’re in summer. Each brush stroke draws the viewer’s eyes to that shrine, as if it were a jar placed in Tennessee ages ago, a jar rising up, demarcating holy ground, holding a deity. The old boy got it on Facebook Marketplace, FedExed from God-knows-where. Above three plaster busts – Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms –“Graceland” hovers, in the style of Thomas Cole, blessing our baby grand. Joan Didion at the Getty Center You should have seen me leaning on my Corvette, staring from behind dark glasses, cigarette in hand while the Pacific Ocean churned wild blue, hurling breakers at Malibu, the coast receding to empty sky. Or, given my sneering prose, you might have pictured me in Haight-Ashbury, a classic photo-journalist pushing through pot-reeking alleys clutching proof the Golden state is Hell and things really do fall apart. But you’ve hatched me dredging through files, in a dimly-lit basement archive. Whiff of perspiration and pee. When I’ve found what I need, when Southern California grinds to the brink, I’ll send a factotum. For now, think of me as a latter-day cloistered monk, fallen from grace, hunched over texts, as if praying. I survey life from a distance – and it is endlessly strange.
Michael Mintrom lives in Melbourne, Australia. His poetry has recently appeared in Amsterdam Quarterly, Blue Mountain Review, London Grip, Panoply Zine and Stone Poetry Quarterly.
