Joe Oppenheimer

Death is not a continuum you might believe.  One either is, or isn’t.  And pushing daisies as one answer on Yahoo says, “means you're dead ... like they bury you in the ground and then plant flowers on top of your grave.”  But is it all so simple?  The arts often portray reality more complexly, as reflected in the imagination of the artist.  In the arts this simplistic notion of death can be played with.  My three poems deal with this ultimate boundary of life and death. 

      Death can, for example, come before the end of life.  It was with just such a self-portrait that an old, and obviously tired, Emilie Charmy (a French painter of vibrant, sexually charged portraits and self-portraits) expressed that one can be alive ‘in death.’   And in Self Portrait  Charmy’s last painting surreptitiously communicates this sentiment to a hanger of her paintings 45 years after she died. 

      And what is death if it is not the disengagement from one’s surroundings.  Yet one can leave the immediacy of life without dying.  One can escape life in the material sense and find a home in the mind.  But is such an escape from life’s actuality also a form of dying?  This is the question asked by the road that goes no where and the heron who does not fly in Ekphrasis.

      Of course, it is only in seances that the dead are able to communicate with the living.  But who are the dead?  Must they once have been alive, or are fabrications of the art, fictional characters, also dead?  And can they turn around and communicate back to the living?  Do they have a voice to complain, to beseech, to demand justice?  Can their complaints sully the artist and her reputation beyond her epochs?  This is the question posed in Serving Tea in an 18th Century Miniature.