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  • "Geraniums Before Blue Mountain"
  • Mary Jo Salter (bio)

How trusting the hand that balanced them on the railing of a farmhouse porch—      three terra cotta pots of geraniums that a careless elbow      could send to smithereens.

But was it the farmer or the artist (naïf or faux-naïf, or neither)      who slid two of the plants a bit to the left, one to the right, creating      a gap through which to view

another farmhouse in the middle distance, in two shades of blue,      with childish chimney smoke billowing domestic joy      so high it seems volcanic?

. . . Seems rightly to belong, in fact, to the mountain whose blue mass      in the background, pitched itself like a slate-roofed, sagging house,      demands most of the canvas.

Whoever first had set the scene— who placed the geraniums "before,"      as the translation has it, the mountain, and made the flowers loom,      upstaging all the rest— [End Page 25]

what's clear is that somebody meant, like us, to overwhelm the sublime      with a pint-sized ornament that was human; to get the fingers dirty      in setting things just right.

August Macke, then twenty-four, may well have been too fresh-faced not      to paint the scarlet, pert geraniums largely as they were.      Or that's the background story,

learned after I had left the museum and typed his name: there on the screen      bloomed images of heads, bright-hued but faceless, which he'd become      a little famous for;

and ladies in parrot-jackets who stand, behatted and parasoled, peering in shop      windows for more hats; zoo parrots; a newspaper reader      hunched on a park bench;

the artist's wife with a plate of apples; sun-yellow cafés. "Unlike his fellow      German Expressionists," a critic wrote, "he was known to salute      the primacy of life."

Known after 1914—when, leaving in Bonn the wife and children,      in a French village he met a bullet, and dropped there in his trench      face down, like a flowerpot.

Mary Jo Salter

Mary Jo Salter joined the faculty of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars as a professor of poetry in the Fall of 2007. Her new volume, A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems, will be published by Knopf in 2008.

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