(NOT) A VILLAINELLE (PROPER) FOR V. L.

(NOT) A VILLAINELLE (PROPER) FOR V.L.

"My idea of painting the perfect painting is one that captivates the viewer (and) no matter how far you walk away from it, it pulls you back like a magnet and won't let you go." – V. L. Cox


“They’re in my DNA,” she says of the circles.
They look like handmade wedding bands,
gold or silver wrought by the slam, miracle

of a hammer after the glow of a heated rod
reaches intensity for perfect strike, hands
for embrace of a lover, strokes given a nod

by a spirit in extraterrestrial Nebula. She translates
what can’t be explained, canvas plane
almost 3-D, reds off the prism. She waits

patiently, has the good fortune to feel her canvas,
its paints a bloodline to her. The viewer,
hypnotized by the ironically abstract, trusts

her intuitive mix of paints. If only a few stir
in the sensuality of how the color of rust
perfects a rush, she says she just can’t live without her.

Or, is it I exchange her for it, a painting’s lust-
re, her simpler truth of drawing circles as a child,
her beginnings circular, broader to embrace, just

the way it was, and is. I like the symbolic that’s wild.
Her paint on canvas like moist on skin,
I just can’t live without it. I’d walk down another aisle,

a dimension of V. L., villainelles and sestin-
as on colors for my six senses, synapses a blend,
overlap of sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, the sixth between

them all, where I step into a V. L. painting.
(Or does it step into me?) Captured, then opened,
it’s like her muse is given to generosity. There’s such a thing

as a villanelle proper. It’s not in my pen.
Colors splendid when a galaxy explodes, or stings,
like strings of lightning, only a V.L. can tell when

perfection meets, then melts, makes a painting like kin,
and a lover paint in pant, echoes to the viewer ring-
ing in her own circles, praying, "Don’t stop her!" Then,

she clicks the icon for save, ponders, "Will this be sent?"

Melody Berning (2006)