Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II), Zuihitsu by John Brantingham

Pictured Above: Vassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 27, Garden of Love II

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Editor's Note: Originated in Japan, a zuihitsu (meaning "follow the brush") is a literary form typically written in free verse that uses interwoven writings to comment on subjects that tend to respond to the author's surroundings. (Source: Poets.org)

Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II)

Today, I came up over the rise out of breath not so much because of my faulty heart valve but because of the medicine meant to keep me alive because my heart valve is trash, and I looked out over the valley covered in beech, birch, hemlock, and maple and thought about Kandinsky’s Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II). I thought that Kandinsky was wrong because in my mind Kandinsky’s abstraction is meant to show us a manicured garden, maybe like one you’d find in ancient Rome or Pompeii, and I thought no, no, no, this is the garden of love, me leaning with my hand on a tree looking over the wild garden of Western New York, all that animal frolic hidden because of the dense leaf cover. And who knew? Maybe there were a couple of teenagers down there too, run out of their parents’ houses down in the bushes rolling around and making out and groping each other and clumsy and happy as woodchucks in spring. I laughed to think of it, but not too hard because the medication was still slowing my breath down.

Still, Kandinsky’s painting is a great painting.

And to prove its greatness to myself if to no one else, I reminded myself that it has stayed in my mind all this time. I saw it, I think I saw it, in a museum in Los Angeles or London or in Chicago or maybe in Pasadena or Edinburgh. I don’t know. Maybe I saw it in a book, and the moment was just powerful enough that I imagined myself vividly standing before it, the muted sounds of people talking to each other in museum-voice, the smells of the canvases, the feel of the hard wood under my feet. Whether I imagined standing before it or I actually did, the day I saw it, I stood before it in awe and my brain danced fire.

My brain was dancing today as well as I looked over my Western New York Garden of Love. I could smell the leaves and the creatures and the decomposition and the birds and the water and mud. I thought that it was good to live inside this moment. Some day in the future, if I live far into the future, I will remember this moment and wonder if it was real or imagined.

Or if it matters.

John Brantingham is currently and always thinking about radical wonder. He is a New York State Council on the Arts Grant Recipient for 2024, and he was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been in hundreds of magazines and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-three books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. 

If you would like to learn more about John, you can find his website here.