Cindy Hill: UNTITLED MURAL • Cleaver Magazine

Visual Poetry by Cindy Hill
UNTITLED MURAL, ACRYLIC ON FOUR VERTICAL METAL PANELS, 6′ x 8′, c. 1979

…we cover the universe with drawings we have lived.
–Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

I. Bedroom Mural

I stand on a rock
promontory looking out
across a wide valley.

Well-worn denim slides
softly across my thighs,
a second skin.

A young rabbit pauses,
wary, by my feet,
nibbling white clover,
content inside her skin
of rabbit-being.

Sunset salmon brilliance

glows behind
black mountan silhouettes.

The smell of leaves at dusk.

A long road winds
out of the shadowed darkness.

A single light shines
silver —

someone is coming
up the road

to take me out of here.

II. Repainting the Room

I stare at the paint
on my closet doors,
the tall and slender
teenage girl
so me-not-me
with a brown rabbit
sitting at her feet.

Boldly dabbed acrylic
orange sunset flakes.
Mountains crumble.

I dip my roller in the tray
for a third coat of beige—

Deep forest-green
adjacent walls
would have to go
before I moved away.

To cover over.
To extinguish.
To roll light over dark
is not an easy thing.
You have to keep at it.
Do it again. Insistent.
You have to want
to leave the dark behind.

No longer a bright opening
in a dense, shaded wood,
the scene hangs
awkwardly. Detached.

I lift my roller. Hesitate.
I can’t do it.
Can’t paint over that
small silver light.
Just in case.

Remembering III.

I scroll through
the long document,
this electronic folder
of the poems of my life.
I stop, captured by these
words: “mural” and
“closet doors.”

I hear cheap Levitt metal
hinges as the panels slide
aside releasing airless
must, suspended
breath of mice.

The shoebox full of
feathers, painted red
and labeled,
Feathers.

The shoebox full of shells,
painted blue and labeled, Shells.

Clothes that fit and
clothes
that do not
fit.
Yellow recital dress.
Blue velvet
I sewed and never wore.

The shoebox full of
postcards, painted
with palm trees,
labeled Postcards.

A wooden ammunition crate
full of poems and
love letters
bunched up and tied
in crimson satin bows.

I thought that is what poets do,
sit in their garretts
bundling love letters,
clinging to lined paper
and old penciled poems.

Mural Reborn IV.

Since you painted your closet
doors,
my daughter said, and so I’m
standing on a stone floor,
four Italian stories
from the ground
– eight flights of stairs –
as she holds out the photo
she marked with grids to transfer
to the bedroom wall
– real plaster, 12’ high, 16’ wide – her other hand at rest
on the round nest
that holds my granddaughter,
who’s not yet hatched.

We can measure, she says now.
I watched the video.
We can take a level and a blue
chalk line and snap.

My mind already flows through
my short pencil stub.
I wave her off
– too complicated,
I don’t work that way –
and climb the swaying ladder.

Before the sun has set Monviso
rises in a cloudy sky
above green hills and villages.
Tiny windows glow
over a king-size
soft grey flannel bed
and fresh-assembled
golden wood Ikea crib.

Her baby will see this
before she sees the world.

Cindy Ellen Hill has penned four poetry collections–Wild Earth (Antrim Press 2021), Elegy for the Trees (Kelsay Books 2022), Mosaic: Poems from Travels in Italy (Wild Dog Press 2024), and Love in a Time of Climate Change (Finishing Line Press 2025). Her poems have been published in Open Door Review, Flint Hills Review, Anacapa Review, and The Lyric. Her essays on sonnet elements have appeared in American Poetry Review and Unlikely Stories, and her novel in sonnet verse, Leeds Point, is forthcoming from Selkie Songs Press in 2026. She holds an MFA in writing and lives in Vermont.