Image: “Forage” by Tammy Nara. “Brushscape” was written by Samuel Ertelt for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, August 2024, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.
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BRUSHSCAPE
A man is stuck between
two dreams in a patch
of thistle. Reaching
down, he picks a spiny brush
and dips it in the sky dark as indigo
before it bleeds. In front of himself,
he paints a lake a memory
a kind of dusk lingering
around the edges of
how reflections appear lavender
when still. The evening blots and runs.
He wipes the brush clean
and turns, turns to steal
some white from the cloud
he’s imagined above his head. The man kneels
and paints the ghost of a snowbank,
but the ghost keeps disappearing
before he can make it solid
enough to melt, and he can only
imagine so many clouds.
—from Ekphrastic Challenge
August 2024, Artist’s Choice
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Comment from the artist, Tammy Nara: “I’m transported inside the painting as it is created. The artist creates his world. The evening blots and runs. (Yes, it does!) Stealing the white from a cloud. The ghost of a snowbank that disappears before he can make it solid. The other poems connected to the metaphor of the thistle, this poem is connected to the act of painting.”
