‘Cosmic Suggestion Box’, ‘SNAFUBAR’, ‘Public Transit’, ‘Partygoers’, ‘In Rubens’ Umbra’ & ‘Toulouse-Lautrec at the Moulin Rouge’

Cynthia Yatchman is a Seattle based artist and art instructor. Her art is housed in numerous public and private collections. She has exhibited on both coasts, extensively in the Northwest, including shows at Seattle University, SPU, Shoreline Community College, the Tacoma and Seattle Convention Centers and the Pacific Science Center. She is a member of the Seattle Print Art Association and COCA.

Cosmic Suggestion Box

Sometimes the world seems like

a rough draft that never got revised.

Yet what might humankind propose

on its own behalf to the divine playmaker

who scants all knowledge of His nature

among beings yearning yet benighted?

With all due respect, in all humility,

perhaps for starters one could recommend

the nullification of evil and free rein,

whose marriage guarantees injustice

and mocks the assumed goodness of the great?

One could, modestly, advocate

a swift end to natural disasters, cataclysms

indelicately termed by insurers

acts of God, who is, after all,

ultimately responsible even if not culpable.

I, for one, could readily do without

meaningless and undeserved suffering,

meaningless and undeserved struggle,

and the bitter misery these engender.

But, admittedly, it occurs to me that

we ought to refrain from passing judgment

on what we can’t begin to comprehend;

should we not give the benefit of the doubt

to the One from whom we seek the same?

Sometimes I wonder whether the one thing

that the Creator can’t possibly know

is what it’s like to be only human…

SNAFUBAR

It seems to us unexampled, though we know better,

even as we huddle in household bubbles,

ensphered in comforts as denizens of the Great Indoors.

Nightly on the tube the newscast leads with mortality tallies

parading death, the original and ultimate product recall.

Out of doors, amid the Bewilderness, seekers of natural light

stroll paths with circumspection and sidle as they near

one another, partly courteous, partly paranoid,

inly speculating of whether a virus symbolizes

the foretold return of the repressed.

Across the canal, in tumble-down downtown,

I note a colourfully fenestrated house of worship

once a hive of humanity, lately suffering a dearth of habitués,

nowadays a makeshift mass clinic

where the masked queue for mRNA jabs

like well-mannered junkies in need of a fix.

This indeed is a collective déclassé,

humankind made to bend the knee.

I wonder of the future, suspended and inexplicit;

at times I'm tempted toward prayer,

though I question how pervious heaven

would be to pleas from the skeptical and aggrieved.

Surely, in the fullness of time, this moment

will be deemed a challenge to the conscience politic,

a mandatory opportunity to confute self-centeredness,

to walk each other home in the spiritual sense,

to inhale as we contemplate the ultimates

and, like those uniformed seraphs

dedicated to the relief of misery,

to strain every sinew toward grace,

at once the least and the most any might attain

while yet among the living.

Public Transit

Suspicious passengers give each other

the stink eye, certain there lurks among them

a perpetrator odious and opprobious

because culpable for befouling their midst

with a lactic and noisome fetor, some casually

self-indulgent (and evidently lactose-intolerant)

miscreant worthy therefore of the reprobation

of fellow travelers now lunging for windows,

desperately gasping for fresh air in lieu

of suffocating fumes, and even as the feeble

and elderly swoon then collapse

the durable rue the routine contretemps

and crudities commuters encounter

while crammed together, seated or upright,

their hands grasping dangling straps,

their nostrils pressed into unfamiliar armpits,

a mass of wearied individuals normally lost

in thought else attuned to blaring earbuds,

though just at the moment universally

hypervigilant if not downright Sherlockian,

hounds sniffing hither and thither,

keen to detect the culprit and definitively solve,

please God, now and for all time, The Case

of the Unprovenanced Flatulence.

Partygoers

Behold the hall, elaborately decorated,

host to ebullient celebrants indulging

in hors d’oeuvres and spirits as they swap

exaggerated facial expressions

and embellished anecdotes between

mouthfuls of herbed cream cheese and crust.

At the open bar, the unattached but hopeful

sip from vinous glasses, appraising prospects;

by the dessert table loiters a man of appetites,

prone to fondling a woman with one hand

and a pastry with the other.

It seems all the world in miniature is here,

spruce clotheshorses flaunting their finery,

praters blathering despite unsubtle eye rolls,

prepossessing belles clad in sard

necklaces and diamantine bracelets,

suitors employing japery or cajolery

to leave a favorable impression,

belly laughers and gigglers alike.

Bless them all, I say; long may they

animate one other and vitalize shared days

while their journeys and fortunes unfold,

while time and chance conspire.

In Rubens’ Umbra

An adolescent prodigy, he enters the reigning

master’s studio in the heart of Antwerp

—as an assistant, mind you, not as a student—

and anon astounds with seemingly effortless skills,

a God-given gift not even his father-rival figure

enjoyed in his own less precocious youth.

He gleans composition techniques

from Europe’s greatest living artist,

a renowned painter-diplomat whose

charmed life reads like a catalog of triumphs,

in whose shade he shivers despite a talent

(if not an education or imagination)

matching his mentor’s.

Only with the exemplar temporarily aside

on official embassies at the monarch’s behest

can the mentee emerge and flourish;

with the field to himself and room to breathe,

he garners attention and comment, befitting

his magisterial abilities with brush and canvas.

Favored and self-assured, he bristles at being

reduced to portraiture (little better than still lifes!)

instead of braving historical scenes, with rare

exceptions evincing his command of that mode;

he limns the master’s young wife, apparently

a protégé’s tribute, though it stokes

rumors of illicit romance, which perhaps,

as he strokes his Van Dyke,

he prefers to neither verify nor refute.

Alas, there was nothing for it but to fly the coop;

heeding the call of his passionate patron,

Charles of England, he migrates to Albion

to become court painter and knighted,

then flatters the vanity of royal sitters,

beautified by specious brushstrokes.

Upon the master’s demise, to Flanders

he repatriates (now phlegmy as well as Flemish),

defiant in his refusal to finish commissions

commenced by his illustrious forerunner,

thereby blemishing his twilight with ingratitude.

Toulouse-Lautrec at the Moulin Rouge

Semi-crippled by stunted legs, the draughtsman

roams the Champs de Mars and, naughty boy,

peeks up the skirt of the wrought-iron lattice tower

rising skyward as dusk cues his return

and he saunters back to his stomping grounds,

Montmartre, to haunt its cafés, cabarets,

nightclubs, and bars, becoming such a fixture

in the pleasure palaces of le gai Paris that he seems

a part of the furniture, drawing as he drinks,

while the floorboards of gaslit stages groan

and creak beneath high-kicking cancan dancers.

By day he hobnobs with Van Gogh or Degas,

but nightly he gulps and observes fellow sensualists

indulging in the bohemian life, bon vivants

who share his taste for the demimonde

with its tempting strumpets and hard liquor;

his fetish for auburn-haired sirens impels him

to frequent brothels until soon he inhabits one,

a strange arrangement easing his urge to befriend

its denizens, which comes at the cost of syphilis.

Wild living can’t keep him from his craft and fame

will be his thanks to pioneering poster work,

though he dreams of the theatre, opera, circus,

arenas of spectacle, fora of imagination,

each better still than the booze that afflicts him

with delirium tremens; at length he finds himself

quivering behind locked doors at a mental hospital,

brushstroking his way to freedom, and senses

his end, nearing and premature, grateful to be

relieved of wracked body and mind, sorrowful to bid

adieu to what have proven to be, at least in his case,

the solacing excesses of La Belle Époque.