Artist Bio

Diane Gage is a writer, artist and Expressive Arts Counselor. Born in Montana and educated in literature and language in North Carolina (Duke, MA) and Arizona (ASU, PhD), she is also a graduate of the Expressive Arts Institute and the European Graduate School in Switzerland. Her visual art has been shown both locally and in Europe. As her work in both literary and visual art evolved over time, she became increasingly interested in the use of art materials and processes for transformative purposes. This eventually led to her association with the Expressive Arts community based in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, which adapts art processes to individual and collective development. Poetry is Diane’s primary passion and she has published poems in various venues such as Rattapallax, Seattle Review, Chattahoochie Review. Puerto del Sol, Poeisis and the National Forum, to name only a few. (Also Letters to the World, Red Hen Press :-)



Sign Language

You make the sign
of the hole in the heart
and mine echoes, hollow,
a rung bell, an oboe,
a saxophone moaning
with longing and loss

I make the sign
of water sinking slowly
into thirsty earth
glistening with shadows
and you set your foot gingerly
at the edge of my mud

This is one of those
understories
the kind told in riddles
and slivers of old bone
in some quiet room
off the main road

What we know
only our hands can tell,
fingering these days
like looms threaded
with petals from wherever
the round earth blooms

Speak to me in mysteries
I will listen to you in song


BLUE MOON

You look like a cross
between a crow and an Eskimo,
one who has plucked my heart --
hard red berry that it is --

and flown it solo to the white north
of your casual brilliance,
your petite friendliness,
your profound and subtle cruelty.

All the way across the table
set with more than we can ever eat
you work your light-swallowing
magic, reverse raven, undoer

of creation as I have known it.
Now the crystal glitter of your image
winks in this hole where my heart
used to be at the edge of a long dark

wing of cloud. I steer by it, rowing
in a pantomime of billowing fog.

About that berry.
It’s yours.

Green Fire

What I fear is often
delicious in small doses -
glass of water, lit candle
hearth-fire, bath

comforting rituals
against elements
writ fatal when large:
tsunami, conflagration.

So I love you just
so much, every day.


& this one too - an abstract love poem, trying to define it:

Loving

something beyond the feeling
although the feeling begins it
and calls it back from dissolution

anything, really, renewed in singularity
although our most precious universal

everything to do with living
although it encompasses death

nothing you can put your finger on
although a whole hand, yes, a palm

you and I as benevolent verbs
active and passive in the same breath
what I came here for, and you

what we most crave, what most slakes
the worst of thirsty yearning
what we best give, best receive

the superlative of sentience
elusive and present, what just escaped
this flung net of words