Matthew Schmidt, featured in the new Ocean State Review
Landscape with Child and Horses
gallop past the slackening posture.
Their leathered manes flap
against the clustered pines.
Child unable to watch the ebb
hooves slice in billowing
grass. Does she discern
slick blades between toes
or the handsome wind
pressing her sternum
like a mottled beak?
With no mackerel or carp
to cushion her fall, the curled
lake trough with spectral flies
greet her reflected torso:
collapsar burying itself
in the muddied picture.
Her head facedown,
reeds crowning its late nod
with a forest tiara.
Blood necklace.
Shallows of blonde locks.
Flare. Nostril. Blackhole.
No words to describe
an acreage of idle thrush.
Matthew Schmidt on “Landscape with Child and Horses“
The poem is not ekphrastic in nature. Instead, I wondered what it’d be like to call a poem after a made-up work of art, to pose as ekphrasis without actually being said. At the time I wrote the first draft of this poem in December 2016, I’d been seeing lots of poems beginning with ‘Landscape’ and thought perhaps I ought to attempt one. I came up with the title first and wrote the poem towards what I thought the painting might look like with such a title. The earliest draft had an arc of stanzas that began with one line, reached an apex at five lines, and ended on a single line (i.e., 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1). While the published version stops at the descending ‘2,’ it retains this increasing/decreasing format. I didn’t set out to use this format, but after I’d written the first few stanzas I compulsively wrote into the style—a sort of challenge or obstruction tackled during the composition. The poem went through several drafts and I even wrote an anti- or reverse poem of this poem titled “Unlandscape with Child and Horses.” This version begins with diction from the end of the original poem and tracks back to its beginning. Obviously, everything didn’t fit exactly right, ergo many edits have been made to that companion piece. In fact, “Unlandscape…” turned into a Fibonacci sequence with syllables dictating the length of a line (i.e., 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…). For years I sent both pieces out together but found no interested parties. I’d almost given up on trying to publish them entirely but, a friend of mine loves “Landscape…” and has hounded me for years to get it published. After the poem was accepted, this friend hounded me for when it would be released. I owe him gratitude for his perseverance when I had lost my will with the poem. In my submission I left out “Unlandscape…” perhaps because I no longer thought anyone would be interested in the two poems as companion pieces. Perhaps that was wrong. I don’t know. What ultimately was useful in writing these poems was trying to live with them inside and out, trying to make them work in mathematical formations, trying to say different things with them, if only slightly, if only oppositely, if only.
Matthew Schmidt’s poems have been published in Pleiades, The Seattle Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, and elsewhere. He is an associate poetry editor at Fairy Tale Review and the Co-Founding Editor of the Iowa-based literary editing and educational nonprofit 1-Week Critique.