Moon’s Rainbow Body
BY Josie Gray
READ Tess Gallagher’s Poem

“Moon’s Rainbow Body” came from something I was reading — from Cave in the Snow about Tenzen Palmo, the English Buddhist nun. But many titles seemed to spring spontaneously out of the paintings themselves. “My Unopened Life” (which appeared in The New Orleans Review) might be one such painting — in which two childlike trees squire each other in a storybook twilight, as if in long conversation at the rim of a hill. This painting in fact became the first to invite me to accompany it with a poem, the verbal arena of the title “My Unopened Life” not only serving to awaken the painting for the viewer, but also leaving behind an invitation for the poem to come. It seemed in this case as if the instant the title came to us I knew I would write it. It was only a matter of finding the time. The poem was waiting. All I had to do was begin and it seemed to write itself. I made very few changes in the drafting.

Although “My Unopened Life” does not mention the painting’s companion trees, their silent commerce with me helped to generate the poem that in turn tries to open the negative spaces around a lived life — those lives we did not open, or in Frostian terms: the road not taken. My poem “Heart-Mirror” (appearing in the collection, American Zen: A Gathering of Poets) also shows the complicated way in which Josie’s images evoke a response through my poems, the piece only coming home to Josie’s painting at the end where a “rubbed clean heart” can for once get what it wants: “this child’s moon/ and three sentinel lovers.” Here, the poem seems not related to the painting in a frontal way, but veers toward it as exclamation, in the mystery of a child’s moon flanked by three “guardian lovers”.

The idea of a heart-mirror comes from my Buddhist readings. A heart-mirror is an inner place into which we gaze in meditation to see what our heart “looks like” spiritually. Although Josie is Roman Catholic and only knows some fragments of Zen ideas from me, in the naming process his paintings have indeed begun to admit my own preoccupations. But it’s not just a matter of me deciding. Each painting has to “accept” its title and we might reject thirty other titles to arrive at the one selected. Not only do we both have to agree, the painting itself must “agree”. We prop it before us and glance back and forth at the painting, at each other. We try to dismiss each title, but ultimately we will accept a title on the painting’s behalf, one the painting seems to receive.

Then Jeff Fraga, who began showing Josie’s work a couple of years ago at Fraga Gallery on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle, Washington, saw my poems inspired by Josie’s paintings and encouraged me to write more. This then became the theme of the first show at the gallery. I wrote out my poems by hand and they appeared in frames beside Josie’s paintings. We repeated their side-by-side appearance again in March 2005 at Fraga Gallery. People really seemed to love reading poems based on paintings, Jeff told me. They would remain in the red alcove of the gallery until you began to wonder if something had happened to them when they didn’t reappear.