Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

Poetry inspired by painting

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — I wrote “Domino Players, 1943” after studying Horace Pippin’s celebrated painting, exhibited by the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. This “memory painting” depicts Pippin’s childhood in Goshen, New York. A child sits at a kitchen table watching two women play dominoes while an older woman sits piecing her quilt. As I studied the painting, I thought about the wounded World War I veteran poignantly looking back and trying to paint his childhood and the security of home. His painting evolves into an act of recovery and restoration. I also imagined the three women in the painting as Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos – the Greek fates. They hold the thread to the child’s life and to the life of the artist and veteran. The poem suggests history’s continuing presence. The smoke rising from the pipe of the woman smoking in the painting recalls the smoke of no man’s land, the exploding shells, the terrifying destruction. The poem reflects the resonances of history and the unknown fates that underlie all our lives.

 

Domino Players, 1943

Tiles, stones, spinners, bones, bricks and men—dominoes

spilled atop a kitchen table knock like teeth, like tumbling

die, each tile ticked into place. In an oil painting

by a crippled doughboy, twenty-five years after the War,

two women and a child play dominoes, play and stir the tiles,

while the child, fulcrumed between the two, looks on, his eyes

like knives, like stabs of paint. His granny watches, piecing

her quilt, lifting and snagging her needle like a query.

This is recollection’s accounting: bare lathes

and cracked plaster, smoke-hued walls, a cast iron stove

fanged with flames, the window and its ratty shade,

a wooden floor agued as an old man’s bones.

 

But displayed on a doilied shelf, a clock and a kerosene lamp,

time and fire, one the mirror of the other, all things burning,

all hours trimmed like a cotton wick in a globe of kerosene.

In this painted room, Clotho draws her sanguine thread

while at her feet scissors lie angled on a swath of red, a sign:

All breath is thread and all flesh shroud, or all breath

tether and all flesh a bridle pieced from make-do and remnant.

 

At the painted table Lachesis sits in a polka-dotted blouse,

her waist strings carefully cinched and carefully bowed.

Worrying a long-stemmed pipe, Atropos measures breath

into skeins of smoke, smoke to drift over the child’s head,

the bluish brume that will rise over the sumps and shell holes

of Meuse-Argonne, the smoke of Chateau-Thierry and Séchault,

doilies of smoke that will clot the scalded lungs of fallen boys.

But that drifting smoke is far away. The child knows nothing,

 

nothing of how men will topple like dominoes, like black

tiles above a blackened earth, how the black rain

will beat black notes against their brows. The child

only watches, only waits, only listens through the long

rounds to the tiles’ bump and toothy-click, to the scissors’

snip, to the rocker’s beat against the crooked boards.

A wounded vet lifts his brush and studies the painted child

who cannot see him, cannot feel the shrapnel-blasted arm

that lies ahead or the pressure of the brush against his brow.

Read Next

Life sciences Photo of Michael Ward standing in tall grass on a riverbank.

How are migrating wild birds affected by H5N1 infection in the U.S.?

Each spring, roughly 3.5 billion wild birds migrate from their warm winter havens to their breeding grounds across North America, eating insects, distributing plant seeds and providing a variety of other ecosystem services to stopping sites along the way. Some also carry diseases like avian influenza, a worry for agricultural, environmental and public health authorities. […]

Announcements Marcelo Garcia, professor of civil and environmental engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering.

Illinois faculty member elected to National Academy of Engineering

Champaign, Ill. — Marcelo Garcia, a professor of civil and environmental engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Social sciences Male and female student embracing on the quad with flowering redbud tree and the ACES library in the background. Photo by Michelle Hassel

Dating is not broken, but the trajectories of relationships have changed

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — According to some popular culture writers and online posts by discouraged singles lamenting their inability to find romantic partners, dating is “broken,” fractured by the social isolation created by technology, pandemic lockdowns and potential partners’ unrealistic expectations. Yet two studies of college students conducted a decade apart found that their ideas about […]

Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

507 E. Green St
MC-426
Champaign, IL 61820

Email: stratcom@illinois.edu

Phone (217) 333-5010