Although Karen Black is best known as an actress, having won two Golden Globes with a third nomination for roles in such movies as Day of the Locust with Robert Redford and The Great Gatsby, and with an Academy Award nomination for Five Easy Pieces with Jack Nicholson, she has recently turned her hand to writing. Going Home, her short film, won the Golden Plaque at the Chicago International film festival in 1997. She co-wrote and co-starred in First Degree, in competition at the Austin Film Festival in October 1999, which garnered praise. Her screenplay, Deep Purple, was accepted at Robert Redford’s Sundance Screenwriters lab in Utah, which chooses ten scripts every spring from hundreds that are sent in for acceptance. Karen did the original adaptation of the novel, Men by Margaret Diehl, which won awards at various festivals throughout the world, and garnered the Best New Director award for its very young director, Zoe Clarke-Williams at the L.A. Film Festival. Her play with music, Missouri Waltz is shortly to play at Second Stage, the Blank Theater with two time Emmy nominee Lee Purcell and bright new film star, Tanna Frederick, music by American song-writing legend Harriet Schock. Karen’s newer poems were published in the California Quarterly only a few months ago.

GOD THE MATHEMATICIAN

In His understanding
He brought the trees to light
by simple mathematics.

Working downwards from the
very first blueprint
where each and every leaf
has space to gaze up into
wide
blue
sky.

He fashioned it that light,
by perfect measurement,
can fall itself to light
upon
each
new
leaf.

He made the rain to slant
(in every country here)
quadrillions of degrees
so that it wetted every
breadth of growth,
through brambles, through the tangled
branches down so each
drop wakens
every
tender
leaf.

God the mathematician
drew the distances just
so that every leaf-like
form be somewhat
lesser than the whole
of each
surrounding
leaf.

Clever God
that every leaf
here should be placed within
a measure of its peeking
space inside which now
can come the sense of summer
and the airwave’s intercourse
with
each
new
spring.

Clever God
His spaces well beyond
my understanding, but
bearing up, it seems,
to standard measurement.

READING LAMPS

When he read
she watched him.
And when she tired
of putting the wonder there,
she turned away
And read her own book.

No matter how the splendor flowed
nor how the printed page incurred her rhapsody,
nothing could compare

with his recent pale profile
against the darkening room.

HAPPINESS IS AN IMBECILE

Happiness is an imbecile

who, when being told
life waits in time
struggling, constrained to make
one choice against another

refuses to conceive it.

He smiles his gloating effusive wide grin
(ready to eat the sky)

and not admitting time
to be a present fact at all
holds neither dormant future
against himself.

Instead, inviting inconsolable life to come within
his flabby pink arms

he becomes
empty
impervious
happy.

© 2007 Karen Black