“Landscape with Girl and Flowers” by Keith Ratzlaff

Hannah Crawford, Untitled (Forest Scene with Animals and Man), ca. 1800-1850, watercolor on paper. Gift of Phyllis Crawford ’20, 1980. Collection of the Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College, founded as Randolph-Macon Woman’s College.

after an untitled painting by Hannah Crawford

I was in danger
but not that kind.

There was a cougar
in my dream, but a dog

to keep the cougar at bay.
There was the world

in danger as always
of dissolving.

There were mockingbirds
and stonecrop, violets

and spring.  No,
the danger was being

here in this painting,
a girl nearly mistaken

for a flower—Sweet Betsy,
Sweet Cicely, Blue-eyed Mary.

As if the world were
only a basket of sweet girls—

sweet stay-at-homes,
sweet bonnets-in-the-street.

But I will not be Rose
or Lily, Iris or Myrtle,  not

Daisy, Daisy, Daisy.
Behind my closed eyes

there is a cougar.
Behind my red closed lips

there is Wild Pansy
and its unheard of singing.

Keith Ratzlaff has published four books of poetry: Then, a Thousand Crows, Dubious Angels: Poems after Paul Klee, Man Under a Pear Tree, and Across the Known World. His poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry Northwest, which gave him its Theodore Roethke Award, and in many other journals, including The Georgia Review, McSweeney’s, New England Review, and North American Review. His poems and essays have also been included in such anthologies as The Best American Poetry 2009; The Pushcart Prize XXXI; A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry.