Variation on a Landscape | After Hockney's A Bigger Puddle

← v7n2, Fall 2008

after David Hockney’s A Bigger Puddle Near Kilham

Start with the riven tracks tuned by rain.

Start with the arteries of fall. With this: the cartilage

of trees, their skulls filling with light, filling

with blue accomplishment.

Start with the bleeding clay, its haemorrhage of soil.

Start with the field beyond the field, the track

narrowing there, a meadow the path dreams

in a rising arm of rain.

Start with a puddle of rain, its lens reflecting

the tree’s spent doctrine.

Start with the eye, this muddied pupil.

Start with its indifference.

art nature

Adam Chiles

Adam Chiles’s first collection of poems, Evening Land, has just been released in the UK by Cinnamon Press. His work has been anthologized in Best New Poets 2007 (Samovar) and Best New Poets 2006 (University of Virginia Press), and has appeared in such journals as Barrow Street , Beloit Poetry Journal , Cimarron Review , Gulf Coast , Indiana Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly . He is the recipient of scholarships and grants from the Banff School of Fine Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Canada Council, and the Gilman School in Baltimore, where he was the 2003–2004 Reginald S. Tickner Writing Fellow. Adam currently lives just outside of Washington, DC, and teaches English and creative writing at Northern Virginia Community College.