Besides “Moon’s Rainbow Body,” other collaborations include “Emanation of the Red Child,” whose naming proceeded from my exclamation on first seeing the painting — that the red splotch in the water-like area below a green bank of color seemed to “emanate” a mysterious human energy in the wild thrown-away-lost of the painting.

Emanation of the Red Child
BY Josie Gray
READ Tess Gallagher’s Poem

Josie and I then began to discuss “emanation” and what a strange word it was, looking it up in the dictionary and marveling that without evidence — with only feeling — such a word had been coined to indicate a field of power flung off an object or presence. A particulate radiation of influence.

We agreed the floating red could be a child. An emotional ground seemed to be forming, and when I went to the painting again, the poem just sprang lyrically from it. This poem seemed to be joy-riding me along with it. Each time I referred to the painting, I came away with an inrushing sense of this red child. Again, my Buddhist readings about the nature of being in a body, of being born, comes into the poem. A breathless plunging drives the poem’s rhythms, whereas the painting seems tranquil and still. And the complementary red-green of the painting seemed edgy and reciprocal at the same time.

Lady Betty
BY Josie Gray
READ Tess Gallagher’s Poem

Josie’s painting of a stalwart tulip conjured up the name “Lady Betty,” since it felt like a personage — a someone who’d withstood much and still held herself upright. We had just been in Ireland where I’d read about Lady Betty who’d been reprieved at the Roscommon Jail when she’d agreed to serve as the hangman when none was available. She herself had been accused of murder and been ready for the gallows. According to one source she’d killed her husband and in another, her son. I began to imagine how the town must have regarded her. This narrative grew from facts turned legend, then reimagined in the poem as I considered what it must have been like to escape death only to be made use of in this fashion in the destinies of others.

For me, there seems a slightly haughty, ironic feel to the commerce between the tulip painting called “Lady Betty” and my poem. I entered a suppositional use of the facts, testing what might have been as well as what I knew from history. Josie might have been less forgiving of Lady Betty than I — but we both agreed hers was a story one couldn’t forget, a killer made use of by the punishment system to do exactly what she’d been found guilty of doing: killing. The fact of this being a woman added another dimension in a time when women were chattel and no refuge for abused women existed. Whether she was actually abused by her husband, however, I don’t know. I conjecture this from the times, from the likelihood of womens’ circumstances during that period.

But these are just quick sketches of the ways in which Josie’s paintings and my poetic responses have struck up a dialogue. In every case, however, the direction of the arrow always proceeds from painting to poem and not the other way. Josie discovers his paintings in the colors and shapes of his imagination, and our naming is a process of rediscovering and even reinventing what has occurred.

Josie discovers his paintings in the colors and shapes of his imagination, and our naming is a process of rediscovering and even reinventing what has occurred.

A hum of magic, of something mysterious always attends these collaborations, like the trout in the instant before it bites the hook. I feel the paintings pulling words from me, creating worlds. I’m with Josie on the Lough Arrow of our imaginations — catching the beautiful brown trout to be sent in our stead to those waiting in a far room, maybe needing just what the conjoined arts of painting and poetry can give, and allowing these unknown people to feel that other such joinings are not simply possible, but are probable because of the fresh energy art originates when it allows, then celebrates, a collaboration between not just arts but artists — the shuttle action of art infusing life and vice versa.