Anne Makeever
Learning Geranium
Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants
I grew up in the Midwest with a mother who painted birds on canvases, using fine-point brushes for the feathers, mixing black, white and umber to get just the right shade of brown, and with a father who helped me learn to read wind and water and to love dramatic storms. His playfulness with language gave me permission to describe what I see.
Since God and I fell out many years ago, I’ve come to realize that my compass is nature. It thrills me to know that the average cumulus cloud, weighing some 1.1 million pounds, is made of particles so small gravity has little effect on them, that there’s stardust inside me that spins and whirls in patterns governed by mysteries I can parse. When I consider the delicate threads of mycelium from fungi that form a mycorrhizal network turning the forest’s trees into a community, I understand more about how to live in this world.
What I’ve wanted most to give to my son, the toddler on the stoop in “Learning Geranium,” is the ability to marvel, to wonder about where we are, to see hope in the way the green world regenerates whether we tend to it or not, to recognize our place in a microcosm that reveals its laws when we pay attention.
Anne T. Makeever lives in Brunswick, Maine with her partner and an exuberant dog. Before settling there, at the edge of a salt marsh, she lived in Missouri, New York, Michigan, Texas, Colorado, Wisconsin, South Dakota, and Iowa. She holds a BA from Eastern Michigan University and an MFA from Washington University, and works as editor-in-chief of Curiosus, a magazine about the art and science of medicine. She has published poems in, among other journals, Helicon Nine, The Eliot, Caliban, River Styx and The Ravens Perch.