Black Lines
by Emma Moss Brender
for mom
All this time I was thinking about the black lines
I imagined a woman welding chance trusses against a white sky
but it wasn’t Helen Frankenthaler it was Franz Kline.
The ghost of essentialism floats like an afterimage when high
contrast lights and darks enter the eye.
For more than twenty years I’ve loved those black lines.
I’ve read Kant on the beautiful and the sublime.
I say memory is the best test: what stays in the mind.
But why did mine choose Helen Frankenthaler over Franz Kline?
Maybe the sound of her name became a kind
of song whose angular unfurling implied
the black lines I was thinking about all this time.
Recently a poem about a black square moved me to go online.
I saw so many colours. That was the first-dawning sign
that all this time I was thinking about the black lines
it wasn’t Helen Frankenthaler it was Franz Kline.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Emma Moss Brender completed an MA in creative writing at Concordia University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in yolk, long con, Ahoy, and Headlight Anthology. She lives on the unceded Indigenous lands of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.