Stuart Kurtz Verse-Virtual 2015 April

April 2015

I started my writing career in sleep-away camp. I was sick and had nothing to do, so I lay on my bunk and composed a sketch about a reporter named Milton Moncrief who was covering a volcano eruption. He interviewed people as they ran from the ash and lava. He didn't have a clue - and maybe I didn't either...that the sketch was pretty bad, or that I would some day choose this as my profession. I am now doing cultural journalism, drama, and poetry. North Park Vaudeville in San Diego presented my play, Hey, Pete, There Must be Some Mistake, in October, 2012. I was the only American reporter to cover Toronto’s Scotiabank Nuit Blanche in 2009. My first full-length play about an environmental disaster in future Iowa is now taking shape, and I am marketing my one-act allegory, The Time of Our Joy. Available for hire at writerstuartk@gmail.com Blog www.stuartkurtz.blogspot.com and poems published here:
http://www.carcinogenicpoetry.com/2012/07/stuart-kurtz-five-poems.html

Oxblood

Our ceramics teacher told us
About the hapless potter who worked
For the king (doesn't everybody?)
One day from out of his kiln came
Tableware the color of oxblood –
The noblest and most desired of the glazes
Upon seeing it the king was in rapture
And bid the potter to create more of such wares
For the royal table
The potter confessed he was at a loss as to
How this happened
(Truth be told, a creature had found its
Way into the kiln and died there
Its oxygen vented out uniformly during the firing
And, as oxygen makes blood red – voilà)

But the potter was in ignorance of this
He tried everything, every possible combination of
Minerals to reproduce the coloring
But to no avail
And, in trepidation of the king,
With the next firing
He climbed into his kiln with the regal array
And killed himself
When his apprentices opened the kiln
They found no potter
Only a host of vessels
In the most exquisite red imaginable

We were all dumbstruck by this story
And set promptly back to work glazing…
not in the precious and elusive oxblood
But in amber and umber and terra cotta
Nothing with the fallout being death

Myself, I chose an overglaze in clear
A neutral non-color
Under which is my failed skater
Who glides around my plate’s rim
And, cocksure, skirts the outer edge
Then the inner one, and, tripping that,
Skids into a pratfall in my “rink”
His ruddy visage is enough.
Oxblood, were I able to alchemize it,
Would only add insult to injury
No, I covered this man’s shame in clear

That day I saw the world in oxblood

I remember another story, a true one
On how during the Siege of Leningrad
The docents at the Hermitage
Worked day and night to clear the masterworks
Out into evac trains going to the Ural Mountains
And how, once they were gone, the directors still
Showed art, of a non-genius kind, by Leningraders
Who probably died in the starvation
Maybe eating their clay
Perhaps the burial squads had to pry the brushes
From their hands
And how 2,000 residents, museum workers and artists
Among them
Lived together in the museum's cellars, now
Air raid shelters,
Huddled together with some unmovable art
While the bombs fell above
Trying to burn them and the art in one
And suck the air out of their lungs

Oxblood

A gallery owner once showed me a new piece
And as he flipped it to another in the tray
I noticed the reverse had another painting.
He shamelessly stated how canvas was
Sometimes more valuable than amateur art
Which had served its time and now was “retired”
If the first painters moved on to exhibiting in the MET
So be it
If they lived in section 8 housing on food stamps, well…

Oxblood

My cousin, Ronnie, showed off a photo
Of my Uncle Louie in the 1081st Signal Corp in Morocco
He was in uniform but not always fighting Rommel
You see, he was in special service, namely to entertain
The troops, crooner that he was,
He would battle by day and turn into an artist at dusk
While the desert tried to draw him out
Of the canteens into the heat
He made it out alive and lived to sing in peace
Until diabetes and a raft of ailments claimed him much later
Ronnie says he had too many red blood cells,
That he had to donate some

And, even while we sat in his den in Delray Beach, Florida
Smiling at those photos of “The Voice” in the desert
Louie was drifting away
Though, now, those Polaroids are the remains
The chemical baths forming a shiny gloss seal over him
They are in black and white
But, if I could retouch them,
Don’t you know it would be in oxblood?