The Seasons by Amy Antongiovanni

When asked whether she would continue painting after the death of her husband, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner said of her series, Green Earth, “this was my answer.”

As crickets sing relentless after-dusk
she listens sees his lips fingers

paint-stained cement slab
where he worked in the barn

black & yellow lines of Autumn.
She listens into morning

and these rotund shapes become clear
pink raspberries,  guava,  half-bitten fruits

of late summer tall grasses
sway in broad strokes.

She walks past the barn to the coop
gathers three eggs    one green for herself

two for tempera and after breakfast
separates the yolk clean from the white

drains the fatty albumen then
palms the yellow globe back and forth

his bald head  until it dries
his best suit how she split the back seam

in order to button it at his breast.
Quinacridone rose red ash

spooned into the jar, fugitive powder,
she muddles the gesso

her brush strokes an inverted heart, perennial spring
stipple of stems and large breast-flowers

that never gave milk but could sing
a lullaby of their own accord

and this her answer was Yes.

Amy Antongiovanni is a poet and English Instructor at Butte Community College.  Her work is published most recently in OccuPoetry, How Higher Education Feels, Commentaries on Poems That Illuminate Emotions in Learning and Teaching by Kathleen M. Quinlan, Wing Beats II, Squaw Valley Review; A Room of One’s Own, and Watershed Review. She has an MFA in Poetry from Saint Mary’s College and is a member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and Napa Valley Community of Writers. She lives with her family in Chico, CA.