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Sequestrienne

By Dorothea Tanning 1910–2012 Dorothea Tanning

Don't look at me

for answers. Who am I but

a sobriquet,

a teeth-grinder,

grinder of color,

and vanishing point?

There was a time

of middle distance, unforgettable,

a sort of lace-cut

flame-green filament

to ravish my

skin-tight eyes.

I take that back—

it was forgettable but not

entirely if you

consider my

heavenly bodies . . .

I loved them so.

Heaven's motes sift

to salt-white—paint is ground

to silence; and I,

I am bound, unquiet,

a shade of blue

in the studio.

If it isn't too late

let me waste one day away

from my history.

Let me see without

looking inside

at broken glass.

Source: Poetry (April 2002).

Biography

Artist and writer Dorothea Tanning grew up in Galesburg, Illinois, and spent almost 30 years living in Paris, before moving to New York City. Tanning started writing poetry in her late ’80s, and her work was subsequently published in the Yale Review, the New Yorker, Poetry, and the New Republic. Her first collection of poems, A Table of Content, was published in 2004. The epigraph to A Table of Content comments that “it’s hard . . .

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