Boldt Words & Images: Screen Savior

By Bob Boldt

Watching star beams float over and around

mushrooms in a pastel forest of soft, silk soil,

I was, for a second, maybe less, in my parent’s

living room listening to “Captain Midnight”

Boldt Words & Images: Waiting for Thunder

By Bob Boldt

Ages, my ages ago, I lay awake,
feeling Mother’s starched sheets
between thumb and forefinger,
my incredibly distant big toe

imagined the monster beneath my five-year old’s bed.

I understood somewhere between brain and breastbone

the full push of the terrifying, infinite universe.

Boldt Words & Images: Back to Work

By Bob Boldt

“Smartassed kid,”
the foreman grumbled,
throwing his cards down
on the worn, wood plank

Outside the wagon window,
a cloud broken sun awoke
from the rain. A clatter of spades
announced our return to the ditch.

Boldt Words & Images: The Great Jane Mudd Painted My Portrait as It Rained Outside in Columbia, Missouri

By Bob Boldt

Before she turned on the light, the splatter on the studio’s

rain-clattered skylight gave the room the appearance of

an aquarium.

Jane’s quotations from art history were pinned everywhere,

wallpaper clipped from the pages of art magazines and

old postcards from Paris. Vermeer’s maid gazed

on Dora Maar. Picasso ogles a Lautrec dancing

to catch a sidelong glance from Paul Gauguin.

They made the small studio
seem both crowded and vast.

Boldt Words & Images: Good Evening! Good Evening!

By Bob Boldt

Imagine dollars in my hand 

meaningless as November leaves.

Money, like all the precious, leaves first.

None would prefer freezing

over the warmth of the last flaming Bible.

Rudderless, captainless, shipless, wreck,

I wander like Tyrannosaurus before me,

watching his fiery, July 4th, slow-motion descent.

Boldt Words & Images: Calavera Number Six

By Bob Boldt

Artificial skeletons are hardly ever displayed

now in thought or in sight.

Shop windows are voided of all but surgical masks.

Imagine what all the uncut pumpkins

must think of the strange ones this year.

Boldt Word & Images: I Am Transfixed

By Bob Boldt

I Am Transfixed by a Giant Water Lilies Triptych

by Claude Monet 1995 Chicago.

(after James Wright¹ and Rainer Maria Rilke²)

Four feet in front of me looms a waterscape.

Claude Monet painted scenes of empty air

where even a Rouen Cathedral might float