[Home] Poems on Paintings, Individual Artist: Pico Reinoso Panoramic Nude Susan H. Case Is Edward Hopper Here? Paul Espel Road with Cypress and Star Charles Fishman The Day Was Breathing Phil Fried Altman's Akhmatova Maureen Holm The Use of Words Nicholas Johnson Images II Paul Murphy The Harvesters Mark Nickels Vesuvius Flows into Jacob More The Dawn of Jacques-Louis David. Baruch November Samvara and Vajravarahi in Union Sharon Olinka Artemesia Tilman Riemenschneider Ellen Peckham Fall of an Angel Viktor Tichy sun in an empty room George Wallace On Rousseau's The Snake Charmer Mark Walling Bacon's Triptych Rob Wright Three Shades At the Piano Michael T. Young Contributor Notes Art: Web Access ~ . ~ . ~ Panoramic Nude, Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni Susan H. Case I like the idea of the superwoman. I've always liked big, tall women that are strong and powerful. —Helmut Newton Look—there's one standing on the stone steps in black four-inch v-shaped heels large sunglasses—veiled porcelain face and oversized hoop earrings nothing else. Her straight dark hair is slicked back. Nearby an urn with a small plant sits atop a cracked marble post— the end piece to the stairway banister. The slit in the post is pointing at the slit in the woman. She has both hands on a big dark gun— police or military position pointed slightly down. Panning the background you can see Lake Como a blurred empty ferry nicely groomed palm trees. Everything here is well groomed. Terrace chairs have been put away. It's off season. She must be cold. On the terrace stands a man pending removal also in sunglasses turned away from the water. He is dressed in a black coat and looks at the back of the woman who is looking at you. They are both without expression suspended awaiting whatever will next require a woman of steel. ~ . ~ Road with Cypress and Star Charles Fishman painting by van Gogh (May 1890) Earlier, the trees are earth, then water and flame—but here they are smoke, dark green smoke …turrets of blue wind. As always, what we thought complete, frozen, seethes with contradictory fires. Reeds sweep diagonally across this landscape, not orange but ochre, and their heart's blood is change. They will shake the cottage, dreaming in its copse of cypresses-will lean, breathing fine showers of light. Even the sky is a sea that splashes and burns, and the stars that swim in this ripeness are living creatures: two stars, and the moon's startled mouth, and this river of transluminous pigment, this blackgreen pyre of cypresses. Here, all is desire, and these nearly human figures… flesh that will not be consumed. (Reprinted with author permission from The Firewalkers (Avisson Press, 1996).) ~ . ~ The Day Was Breathing Phil Fried Frank Gehry exhibition, Guggenheim Museum New York (May 17-Sept 3, 2001) The day was breathing, we could feel it even within that cocoon of a building as though at intervals in the curved walls invisible curtains were blowing meanwhile we were all inspecting the models of other buildings displayed along the spirally descending ramp disclosing an architect's whole career in significant intervals comprising a less than life-size version of his life including buildings unbuilt but excluding of course the undesigned I was confident we were life-size made to visit and fit the museum with others of our size and kind in reasonable numbers but one well-dressed older woman in a suit was somehow not full-size for her age just slightly uncannily bringing her nose right down to the models which were smaller of course as usual but she was almost patrolling them looking intently as if she were puzzling out how to enter circling them to find the right door beneath the metallic undulating waves of roof cascading down the simulated hillsides round and round she went then made a beeline for the next one and perhaps an odor a perfume of titanium drew her was she pollinating them in some improbable way preparing to carry the seed to the world that would break us out of boxes at last or did she live here growing smaller as we descended and I lost sight of her at the beginning of his career where we first bought our tickets so that as we left she was entering the tiny determined world of our future ~ . ~ Altman's Akhmatova Maureen Holm The zinnias are gone I burst with crimson Stand up and do something human What is human Hardly anything Say something red      —Alice Notley ("Red Zinnias") The legs suffered most, for sheer length of bone, plumbed of their marrow,           dipped and redipped Rule and remembrance, as though one garnet knuckle, one husk of ivory carved… 'Armut ist ein großes Licht von innen'           pooling and repooling just hearth enough in fingertip to shape the stiffening wax, but, oh Docht, trostloser, bricht, als Farbe rinnt           mixed and remixed false as weather, sky and bow of transom half-fenestra height of panes unglinting, boxed, sits           taller the longer she reconjures round, the ancient rimming amaranth, the well- frayed rope's wet hermitage           drawn and redrawn in buckets that have sprung their hoops for cold: pale aqua shrubs to spike the cubist path           to odd, to modern unscented air alarms her chandler nose,           flattened and reflattened by his brush, femme assise en comme-il-fallait costume;           hidden by folds, they suffered: spare, broken, spent, her remnant           wicks, molten wax.           The portraitist chose that blue: royal, processional.           Rode her barefoot, stroked in headdress, tusks;           ignored her limp, her short, guttering tail. ___ 'Poverty is a great light from within'—Rainer Maria Rilke Wick, disconsolate, breaks, as color drains [i.e. from the face] (alt: as paint runs). Woman, seated, dressed in the requisite style for her time [or status] (alt: as he required). ~ . ~ The Use of Words Nicholas Johnson after a painting by Magritte The word is a finger that grows out of the floor, points auspiciously at the ceiling. One dots the i with a perfect sphere of pleasure, a seed in the air to prepare for a difficult birth. All indexes of meaning are tricky, unabridged from floor to ceiling. One discovers the lack of a door or a window; it is only the celebration of self that creaks up and down the staircase in the journey from here to there. These are the ins and outs of the situation: the ring of pleasure, a finger to fill up the pink gap, an ax to chop at the claustrophobia of the closed system. All give a name to the boulder that stops the mouth, the insect that deafens the ear, the pin that transfixes the eye. Words take your breath away, and then where are you? Alone in a room full of pink accusations. (Prior publ. Rattapallax #6) ~ . ~ Images II Paul Murphy Sound echoes narrowly on the stairwell:    The night we left the cinema    The homecoming was to a darkened house Strangely, sinister,    As if crimes, odious, terrible had taken place.    In the basement we found a wall of flesh and blue, Don Quixote rode in logic and abstract;    The wind pierced the wells;    The women of Guernica screamed in fixity. Under the house    The paintbrush we castigated    Had changed history. Stealthily, we crept back up the stairs;    Left the scene undisturbed    In the car again we returned later We washed our hands of history.    The artist may take it    And make of it Our trivial destiny. We live out our irrelevance    Our nullity, again and again. ~ . ~ The Harvesters Mark Nickels painting by Peter Breugel the Elder The jug of water shaded in the wheat sits in an island left uncut, preserves the turf-steeped well-draw of the morning, chill, alluvial, and flecked with straw. Faun, slippery and dry, like loaves, the halting round that spins among the scythers, when on the left hand someone sings, begins. I break the circle with no words for it, my shoulders weighted with the habit of a morning's pull, core-empty, with a chaff-raked tongue, and softly catch and cut last threshings severed here last year. Bone colored bonnets own a nimbus in the haze, and someone tips you, boy of three, into my lap, my nose tilting to your hair. It has a smell that leads me into unknown tablatures of gentleness: not adult sour, but like brakes of drying reedmace rocking in a midday thermal—on their shafts the mirrored volume of the silver bay. You are drifting in and out of questions, buzzed by gnats, your features cast in something knowable, but with an effort only. Not the must of low and cytogenic fires, of horseshit and the animals we live with, but how, in any moment, we don't stay, but search the side world, where the spirit slakes its thirst for something apposite but lateral, not just ahead, or back- in hot wheat thinking of the black pines stacked and leaning on each other, crossing in the twilight, barring snow; one in a knot of hunters coming home who think of this—sheared einkorn listening to vespers in close stillness, not the hollow tick of hanging antlers like a kindling hearth. We're all away, most times. Meanwhile, my choice, to follow with my mind the homeward- turning painter, waving off your mother and my wife, who wants her picture drawn. (Finalist: Lyric Recovery 2002. Judge: Alfred Corn) ~ . ~ Vesuvius flows into Jacob More Baruch November Mount Vesuvius in Eruption (1780) 1 The entrails of seraphim unbind, raw, from the firmament. Pompeii confesses to Jacob More. He pronounces the last rights. 2 An elderly woman, everyone's grandmother, though not once a mother, pauses. Addresses her grindstone again. She first drinks the seething exhale of Vesuvius; Jacob More drinks of the last. 3 The dove's addled coos harrow Pompeii's ears. She surrenders her wings to ash. Under layers of crimson paint, no longer will she bring calm to the maritime. 4 Jacob More leaves his stool, walks upon the pebbled sand. He looks to another mountain, though Pompeii's smothered refrain still gropes him: Paint me as though my killer spoke lightning out of scarlet clouds; As though my blood was the first to weep upon the eastern sands. 5 Infinite night descends on Pompeii through muffled screams of falling, the sand converts to glass, the petulant hiss resounds, as molten paint runs into saltwater. 6 The parched canvas beseeches the dove to surface. But Jacob More painted the final rights: A rampart in red clouds to arrest the viewer's eye. ~ . The Dawn of Jacques-Louis David. Baruch November The Funeral Of Patroclus Below an onslaught of cadaverous clouds, sunset, battleships: Loyal Patroclus' death cries itself to you. But it is your birth, Jacques-Louis David, that calls to the dusky, jumbled ranks and the hapless nude princes, who, as they are hoisted upward to feed a vain altar, behold your helm and your early painter's stance. Though you are born in this guise of Achilles, in lament of a fallen ally, you must play the part as you always do: Bind your red cloak for journey. The master's chariot becomes your own. Release lifeless Hector across myth and history. Acolytes and pantheons, in haughty postures, will dawn beyond your severe ocean. ~ . ~ Samvara and Vajravarahi in Union Sharon Olinka How they rise from a whirling bed in spirals, old love, old selves shed like curls of reptile skin, how this burning comes like grace. In this painting from Nepal, Samvara, who destroys illusion, has skin blue as the inside of a sapphire, his eyes all-seeing, darkened by desire. He holds Vajravarahi close, hands crossed over her back. A thunderbolt in each hand Her nipple pebble hard, the deep red of a carnation. Her long necklace of skulls. A tiger tail under one thigh. Even her anus opens, quivers hyacinth sweet. She, with a crown of skulls. He, with a crown of skulls. Their bell, to disperse evil. And when I see this painting I think of you, who have so honored me, how your hands shocked me into awareness, the strength of a single flame, despite distance and trouble, trusting silence, whatever our blood carries to ascend higher. What is between us is not love, the lie men and women live by, but only this purifying fire. (Prior publ.: Poetry Australia and in A Face Not My Own, West End Press.) ~ . ~ Artemesia Ellen Peckham Identification I In that masculine painting As strong as the father's Judith, her muscular arms near the canvas's plane. Intent on the beheading Bends, but as a woman does, Her lower body arched away from the deed, A woman willing to do murder But unwilling to soil her amber-gold skirts With Holofernes's blood. No man, intent on violence Arms raised, pelvis jutting, Stands thus. Identification II On a bed of costly Lapis Blue An idealized body (Refined away the form of her creator) Venus sleeps in her jewels&8212; As I often do. Dreaming away as she has done Corporeal excess and time's scarring. ~ . Tilman Riemenschneider Ellen Peckham Metropolitan Museum, April 2000 (1460-1531, Würzburg) I have thought of these statues for decades Since as a child I first saw the book Lying open in my uncle's studio, Printed pre-World War I, The thick, fibrous pages and sepia print transliterating the subject. I believed the art lost in subsequent battles. Yet here, by some miracle of history, they are— The honey-toned wood more malleable than memory More sonorous in the eye. Deeply undercut and shadowed, the pizzicato Of the hair and beards Accentuates the languor of the fabric's folds. I long to run my fingers there, Bury them in the lime wood caves Let them slide along the highlights But use my eyes instead: Touch that cheekbone, lid, The slightly fractured prescient fingers, Braille of wormholes I cannot read. Why is there so little that today I find as touching, touching? I would love a dress of this wood As silver-ocher in the highlights, Draping as opulently, silver-umber in the depths. Wearing it, I would be contemplative, Still as these figures, Never distracted by the mundane Though in the Elizabeth, Virgin and Child there is A strange unease: The Virgin more fragile of head and body than her child, Still adolescent and seated on an adult's knee. The sandstone wimples, capes and veils Nervy, agitated: No joyful interaction in these three. But oh, the turban, oh the book, The gnarled bole of tree The soft wooden underchin and Prosaic pull against the buttons! The everyday details. Ourselves as Caught by tragic news the impact of which Is petrified with us in the wood. One figure withdraws, isolated in his space, Another, tender, leans solicitously, offers strength. Our hearts ache for them and we are them, We know they preceded torture, share From centuries ago their humanity's unchanging psychology; Confusion, obstinacy, the numbness of their shock and their despair, These trees refigured in the wood As changed as Tilman's hands were by the Inquisitor's rack. ~ . ~ Fall of an Angel Viktor Tichy sculpture by Rodin Sudden as a Cairo sunrise, the arch of her spine airbrushes an undulating shadow on the ledge beneath her marble skin. Wings washed from the stardust by a cascade of Carrara white hair, the woman without a face is being devoured in a kiss. In twilight that belongs to lovers and predators, her lover's hand warm with full memory of breasts clutches her armpit like a deprived talon. How many times the earth shook under the fall of an angel? We all came from such a grasp. What is the one verb that pervades all cosmos? To a small child everything is growing. To you, my son, the universe is never-ending motion, but if you ask your father who can't save one star from collapsing, all in the creation is growing older. He will not abandon you. His job is finished when gradual as Copenhagen sunset, you abandon him. You too one morning will look in the mirror and see your own image turn and drift away. ~ . ~ sun in an empty room George Wallace painting by edward hopper after the people have left a place—i mean really stripped it—the sun returns, in high grace and feline repossession. like this, i mean, from wall to wall, the apartment's sole occupant. only a vision this steady could share its viewpoint with darkness so equally. straightedged corridors, clean corners. an uncluttered floor space. i think the sun sees rooms the way a cat sitting in the presence of human beings might—staring back at things and in his mind emptying the world of them. if the sun had haunches i think it would surely shrug us off, and i mean take a nice easy stroll through all the leased rooms, the mortgaged places. ~ . ~ On Rousseau's The Snake Charmer Mark Walling Her eyes are white diamonds burning inside the mud-banked body, slipped, as it seems, from the brown river into robust form. Framed by the jungle green, the moon in the olive sky, the thigh bends, the knee points in to the dark, vital womb. Snakes, like speculators, walk with raised heads past the pink- winged duck to find embrace, their fearsome terror forgotten-- from the flute in her thick hands? No. Her eyes are white diamonds that burn in the dreams of white painters, longing to tame the color of the jungle. ~ . ~ Bacon's Triptych Rob Wright On October 24, 1971, George Dyer, Francis Bacon's lover and model,committed suicide in a Paris hotel. Two years later Bacon painted a memorial triptych to the day. i The hall lights time out without warning, and the dark runs up eager and slippery, smelling of drains. And you're left holding a key, feeling soddish and unzipped with the childish quinzy of being alone and in the dark. A door cracks open down the landing, and a single eye, large and dim as a cow's looks through you, even in that corridor, black as a Bishop's scrote. And somehow your key finds the sodding hole pins engage, tumblers roll, and you're home. That's Paris for you. A room the size of a coffin, that calls itself a salle de bains, cracks your head and shoulders. Water trickles down your throat and stings like vinegar from a sponge. As you rub a stiff towel over stubble, your tummy wobbles against the sink. 'That's new, Georgie.' You hear a voice, but whose? Francis's? Don't make me laugh. Wouldn't notice. Couldn't notice. Wouldn't care if he did. The 'artist's eye'? Don't make me laugh. All day you walked up one side of St.-Germain and down the other, past the bookstalls on Maubert smelling like your Granny's bedsit, and the painters on Miche in production line laying on linseed, thick and scumbled. The spires of island fortress of faith, looking, to your eye, like Brixton Prison. Here and there, painted gulls bob amid the drift and condoms. Not bad, these hacks. 'And what do you get for that?' you ask in East-London French. The artist quotes a price, and shoves the canvas at you, like you've already bought the smelly thing. And doing sums (for which you have a knack) it comes to a ten pound six. And thinking of what Francis pulls down you want to laugh. ii You strip your socks: your feet pink and stinging. When did that rain begin? You were looking in a shop window with a headboard pitted like a winkle, when that blonde hag came out and tried to dust you off, like you were a dog doing its necessary. Waving her knobby knuckles and shrieking like a daw, 'Allez! Allez!' And a passerby with a walking stick, said more gently and in English, that you'd dozed off with your face against the glass, and did you want a doctor? That's Paris for you. The room's not much, but enough. The light's a treat, the way it bobs and swings as you run the circuit between the bed and toilet, making your shadow trot up and back, like a toddler playing tag with uncle. Finally, the couple through the wall stop screwing. And you sip brandy from a glass screed with lipstick. Nice touch, you think, professionally: one whore to another. 'Not tonight, mon cher,' you say, as you lay out pops and booze. But in what order: size? strength? color? Like Newton playing prism in Oxford windows. Oddly, it's the black ones that keep you going, and the whites that bring the sleep-of-death. Now what sense is that, ye men of science, ye learned doctors? Moving right to left, and washing the whole spectrum down with hock that tastes like liniment, you've got a bellyful in no time. But oh, up she comes. You make the toilet as slops of pink and green splash the rim. You grip the porcelain as the room whips like a pin-ball flipper. Your belly pumps froth, sticky and burning, while some invisible sod blows a siren in your ear. Nice try; even suicide eludes you. iii Night. That's better. Lights come on up and down the boulevard: points of copper in Prussian blue. The rain has stopped, and paving stones, soaked with the piss of a dozen centuries, begin to steam. Eglises begin to play their bells, on all sides like they were in competition for wandering souls. Patience, Ladies. The woman across the street is watering geraniums. Once a beauty she's keeping up with a string of pearls and hair twisted topsy. You cup your hands around your mouth. 'Nice try, Gran.' She smiles that smile people lay on when they don't understand bollacks. You flick your cigarette, watch it tumble through the far-down dark. You've done everything: washed, combed, masturbated, cleaned vomit from the watch Francis gave you. Why the song, 'What now, my love?' keeps running through your skull will remain a mystery for all time. Do it right, Georgie, grind the pills with the glass bottom, mix with a finger, swallow. Through the wall behind your head, come moans of pleasure. And as the bed creaks faster and faster, a giant eye winks shut across the room. And now she's calling out in ecstasy, 'What now, my love         love         love and you want to laugh, but the time for laughter's past. ~ . ~ Three Shades Michael T. Young sculpture by Rodin Brother standing next to brother, each imitates the other keeping in step by thrusting his left arm out to his neighbor's reach. Palms down and centered, they almost hold hands. Backs arched, they tilt their heads and nearly prop them in the cup of their neighbor's collar bone. Their bent knees cross a horizontal with their left hands till their leverage slips out from under the fulcrum of their joints, converging on a ledge of contracted width, a ground of being shrunken to a point somewhere between their feet and fingertips. Thus their posture, devoted to a purpose beyond themselves, can never be explained. And even though everyone wonders what contorts their grace into this tortured pose, since no one's admitted into their intimate circle, everyone retreats from their pain. And only then, by allowing a space for them to suffer their invisible burden, do their converging backs reveal the horizon, the hills into which they've buried their heads to escape the light and enter a peace that holds no consequences for their deeds. ~ . At the Piano Michael T. Young painting by Whistler Mother in a black dress, daughter in a white. The colors of an afternoon at the piano. Mother gently toes the petals. Her hands massage the keys seeming to say, "release, release." She fingers an effortless trill. Her daughter folds her arms and leans over the piano. Her young and restless energies dance in circles around this moment which, when she is older, will remain a space inside her where she still pauses to listen. ~ . ~ . ~