Stone Soup v1, no3, Fall 1989, M Hurley Savage Dream, Steve Sanfield, Ed Miller

Stone Soup v1, no2, MoHurley Mary Bianchi, Electric Fire, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Rosale Sorrells.Summer 1989

THE SAVAGE DREAM

THE SAVAGE DREAM

Gauguin imagines his own corpse devoured by ants.

He carries arsenic in a Peruvian olla up to the mountains.

When suicide fails, cursing God, he returns to painting

the myth of abundance, the golden tropics without a shadow

on the horizon. Te oviri rerioa. The savage dream.

He writes: your work can never be too luminous.

Let everything you do breathe. I'm hard at work.

I am entering into truth, into nature.

Civilization has fallen from me little by little.

I know the odor of the soil.

The concept wells up like a volcano blossoming

strong, hard and pungent, a tapestry of color.

Here, poetry emerges spontaneously.

There are no more refuges to flee to.

The imagination of a lonely man

has devoured his hope with dreams.

Strange white birds eat lizards—

the uselessness of this life.

2/14/89