Art: Auto-Rotation by W. Jack Savage
ZEP
Michael is playing air guitar,
bebopping by himself miles behind
me in the baking sun that refuses to shine
on him because he sees only the shadows
and not the blooming Colza
on the yellow hills or the blue peaks stretched
out before him—me already on the other side
and headed toward the sea.
He wants to sing me a song but wants me
to listen to someone else doing the singing,
Robert Plant, Thank You, Thank You, still not
getting the point of the miles and the reason
for the pus in the blistering heel
of the morning or the mountains inside of me
that have already crumbled while I go on
loving him through drops of whispering rain.
He strikes a sudden high note, heard
through earbuds rooted in the Rioja, vines
entwined and promising fruit, one leg up and
kicking into the silence, the road ahead
and behind empty. He turns up his tunes
and balances the shape of the guitar on his
thigh and struts down the pebbled road,
right thumb bearing down on the weight
of an invisible string—as if the chord could
float through the hills to find me.
About the author:
Jacqueline Henry is a New York-based writer and editor. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from: The New York Times, TSR: The Southampton Review, Clarion, The Cape Rock, The North Atlantic Review, Round, and Writer’s Digest magazine. She won first place in the 2009 Writer’s Digest Poetry Contest for “The Undertaker’s Wife.” She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from Stony Brook University where she has taught creative writing. In 2014, Jacqueline walked six hundred miles across Spain on the Camino de Santiago.
Art: Auto-Rotation by W. Jack Savage
In the artist’s words:
W. Jack Savage is a retired broadcaster and educator. He is the author of seven books including Imagination: The Art of W. Jack Savage (wjacksavage.com). To date, more than sixty of Jack’s short stories and over nine-hundred of his paintings and drawings have been published worldwide. Jack and his wife Kathy live in Monrovia, California.