May 02 [Home] Poems on Paintings, Specialists Pico Reinoso (2001) Ernest Hilbert Saint Michael Casting Satan into Hell Andromeda Chained to the Rock La main de Dieu (The Hand of God) Tom McCarthy Jamie McNeelly Woman in Rickshaw, Benares Woman in Textile Factory, Kerala River Woman Evelyn Posamentier Portrait of the Dinner Table Woman with Orange Umbrella Woman Sitting in an Armchair, 4 October 1941 Terri Witek The Pose Portrait of a Woman Reading The Tempesta Portrait of a Man with a Palm and a Paintbox Xue Di From Flames (Poems Dedicated to Vincent Van Gogh) Field Covered With Crows Church Starry Night Drawridge White Chinese Roses Sunflower Tonight Blues Contributor Notes ~ . ~ . ~ Ernest Hilbert Saint Michael Casting Satan into Hell circle of Domenico Antonio Vaccaro, 1705-1725 Strewn alleys beneath city shadow: Compost drifts burning seaward On empty waters. Everything seems to grow strange As one draws nearer the river. They dozed one day lost On muddy sand in Queens below Rotting planks of piers, rusted Spikes framing towers of Manhattan. Passing the city's last beer garden they Stepped in. Twelve hours later The sun rose again and his light dropped, Woke to find her in the garden reading His Elysium Britannicum—to his horror, She sat in full view of the neighbors Wearing nothing but his white cotton shirt: He exclaimed "For this, the triumph of civilization In the wars of Hellas and Persia?" She asked for more tea, Angling her face to the kind sun. The first Emperor of China raised the Great Wall Against not only horsemen but ghosts, Burned all books to keep out the past. What more can an emperor do? She tells him that all these coffee shops are A manifestation of Divine Will. Who are mere sinners to question such Love? In the dream he drained summer days with her, Now forfeited to years; swimming, Enwrapped on long grass hearing music; And it hurt when he remembered how Much he once loved her but could no Longer recall her face, only her voice. Orbit of dominion, what little we are, and terrible. When Alexander crossed The Hellespont to Asia, he brought a copy Of The Iliad annotated by Aristotle, Slept with it beneath his pillow. His mother, besieged, ate the flesh of first Her elephants and then Serving girls before dying herself. ~ . Andromeda Chained to the Rock Anthony van Dyck 1637-1638 Unstemmed, drain of rivers with light granted, Even if quickened, by a pace to extinction: Bright core and throw of ocean, Lions choked dead by smog in plaster caves at London Zoo— Mayakovsky, so impressed by harnessed electricity, Was afraid he would grow bored with nature. A man forced pieces of cardboard into his shoes And strolled in drizzle to diner as rain echoed Down an avenue, surveyed steam fracture over coffee. Leaving once his sweltering summer interiors, Charles I Visited Van Dyck by barge, and Reynolds raised obelisks Outside his house. "Do you mind if I smoke? Of course not." And of the blonde countess whose estate stranded him In prism of leaves spindling through light on palace lawn, That they once advanced the gravel towpath of the Isis Watching the stony chasm of English sunset Over ice-soaked meadow, past the empty boathouse, lit Cigarettes as one or another hummed Wagner; that she Now floats dreaming with turtles off an Aegean isle With no phone or e-mail; what of it— Fearing that dawn would otherwise fail the world, She arrived in the wet breeze as Concert Master, Rachmaninov that morning, and the announcer remarked That she also raced wolves on her Westchester compound. When introduced, she commented "I think I've already slept with you," turned away— To kiss the Swedish cultural attaché on three cheeks. Seizing a red wine from the garnished table beneath the Picasso, Sidonius climbed the fire escape to the roof in Brooklyn As Manhattan brightened into dusk, toasted: "Orbis Roma tui." When a soldier returned from The wars, only one woman sobbed openly in the dusty square. Nasser called his monstrous Soviet dam at Aswan "A pyramid for the people": He remembered Her, a girl, reading alone at the tangled crown Of an apple tree swayed to valley wind "Voyaging through strange seas of Thought alone." Some wept seeing stars, lights falling in a TV Studio, Hushed imagining death had been made Merely tumult. A black-skirted waitress Leaned over with pitcher, an inverted silver cross Aimed between her breasts. He drank coffee until rain Let up over the park, curtains blowing in and apart. He dreamed of a flood, a darkened café. He never completed A poem once begun, up through The night type-setting obituaries. He imagined himself A French officer on the eve of the Marne, Reassured himself of his waitress: "She has The magnificent blonde plaits, the pale skin, And O the full strong thighs of The conquering daughters of Germania." View ~ . La main de Dieu (The Hand of God) Auguste Rodin, 1896, marble carved by Soudbinine in 1902, 94 x 82.5 x 54.9 cm Appeared as conqueror flanked by spirits Drawing light down Avenue of the Americas— Tomb of harpies, Theseus emerging From shadow dust of urinal With cocaine haloed under his nose, Hailing barmaid for more cold vodka To blank sight of abandonment And smoke going up from shelled villages When Persians encircled his surrendering men Outside Krakow, machine-gunned his officers, When T-34s slipped down streets on ice Over the steaming mass of bodies Collected like sacks of manure in dead wind [Item temporarily removed for cleaning] Lost twenty-four ranking generals to the enemy So were issued with cyanide capsules, Only ever used them to avoid capture By their own spies— Ephesus, Stalingrad, target of pilgrimage, Minotaur in NorthFace puff jacket Surveying the gate, dealing pills And hosting an escort service on the side, With satyrs reveling on psykter and molding, Procession of horse soldiers in black herding shoppers— Clever Helen, horny even in dotage, stirring Pernod and Pelegrino in a calyx-krater Decorated with Herakles and Apollo hugging For death over the Delphic Tripod— In his last pillowed moments in Chelsea, Turner panted "God is light," sea-goddess Painted over by the time German heavy artillery Pounded its siege forward, As Satan dragged unwilling damned Into war with heaven, Nereids windblown Now headless above podium frieze, Blockade by sea and cavalry on the plain: The leading horseman glances over his shoulder Like a Panzer commander across the steppes— "All my goddesses are wingèd, my warriors naked." Two miniature men carved in whale's bone, Seated under arches, one with nimbus, The other leaning aside as if just comprehending What he has been told, about to weep Or turn away completely into his enemy's shadow. View 1—View 2 ~ . ~ Jamie McNeely Woman in Rickshaw, Benares photograph by Raghubir Singh Her eyes are a tiger's through the brush; her black burqa's gauze cannot contain light. And there are her teeth, and glints of silver near each shadowed ear. One wrist escapes to clutch a bolt of polka-dot pink cloth and a lime-colored net shopping bag also made to show its contents. Time is kept by a digital silver watch. There are two bare things: the bald baby on her other arm, its white puff-sleeves like seed pods, its ten clean toes. And the smile that comes to me, for seeming hours, through a tiny grid, like blinding sun through an old screen. ~ . Woman in Textile Factory, Kerala photograph by Raghubir Singh Caught in a web of white, lapis, bright worm green, black, and flesh pink, she turns from spools stacked in stripes against the wall slats. Her red checkered sari hangs creaseless, hands bent absently to pluck invisible strings, tie or untie, the great wooden looms and threadewn floor yawn, gaps you could disappear in, hairlines of stowaway light— None of this, these colors, have had success in penetrating her coke eyes. She is educated, thinks nothing all day but how she'll have a better life than her Jaipur housewife mother. ~ . River Woman After a painting by Maldonado Why is she so sad? Her whole world is pink as melon, eyes blacker than seeds, all pupil and drinking light from the room. The way her head tilts, she's shrugging off the night with burnished shoulders, as if her face should slide into some dark corner; she's about to wring herself dry like the white rag wrapping her blue-black riverbed hair, everything aligned and ready in her rippling brown-bread face: The bow wants to be a moth but is pinned to its lit perch. Her mouth has four corners and a solid black center as if it would never open again, boxes last words of the dead. The white of her dress is a lie, it is slipping out of notice. Nothing has ever been this clean, she thinks, or else why the resigned torpor, sighs? And that pink— It could be dusk or war, the thick black curls are vines or smoke, or wrought iron pried back so she can pass through. ~ . ~ Evelyn Posamentier Portrait of the Dinner Table John Singer Sargent the woman in the portrait of the dinner table fidgets on the canvas, a suggestion of purple permeates the evening. the man she is with is cropped at the right edge of the painting, only a sliver of face remaining. it is one of many evenings they must endure. living in the portrait with limited air adds to her dazed appearance. she is asking something of the painter something barely audible. View ~ . Woman with Orange Umbrella Elmer Bischoff the woman with the orange umbrella has been standing there, posing for the painter, since i was a child. she is bored, or she is waiting or posing as bored to not raise suspicion, with her dark eyes too muddled for detail. she prefers wild & ambiguous brush strokes, a blurring of the hand which clutches the umbrella, lowered for now it has stopped raining. her history passes back & forth between those eyes & the painterıs longing. whether i like it or not, i am implicated. View ~ . Woman Seated in an Armchair, 4 October 1941 Picasso it doesn't even resemble you, grandmother. a cubist calm; fingers, heads, heart of indeterminable color, reserving judgment, hands clasped, thatıs for sure. the steel posts of the chair sit erect. you are looking in the direction of a visa. had it only worked out. your sister-in-law signing over to you her document, identities inherited. or did she die just before. & when exactly. & did little brother stay beside her, as always. or was it starvation that gripped her shaken body, alone. little brother, dear grandfather, what will happen to him? grandmother seated in an armchair, one month before deportation. View ~ . ~ Terri Witek The Pose Before you've shaken dusk from your head And straightened in the dark strange sheets and pillows And set all the things you own to wander (You'll rest soon) Find the pose. Hold still. Before you've coaxed a book through the night, held Its world in your palm like a tinny carousel And let your own thoughts spin to wildness (You'll rest soon) Find the pose. Hold still. Before the plumbless dreams begin And you forget a language, bend a stairwell, Persuade your shiftiest child to burn or drown (You'll rest soon) Find the pose. Hold still. Before dawn has confetti'd every window And even you become substantial, As the clock rents sixty rooms to sorrow (You'll rest soon) Find the pose. Hold still. ~ . Portrait of a Woman Reading That a book propped open on her lap opens her lap is a trope she counters by choosing the page: Giorgione's Tempesta, which seats nude, knee-propped Venus against a storm of shrubbery while from another, more brambly embankment someone makes her his compass, a fellow so lost he also appears on the opposite page in clean red and white stockings. The sitter's shrugged out of her toga, flipped one white corner back over her shoulder for the infant draining her breast's last tears as an unappeasable twilight plumes into a giant tent sale of columns and saplings, dim towns and flat-topped bridges, all fingering the spine of a deeply scented river over which the last wriggle of light climbs away from its cloud toward the only singer still braving a steep roof, beak gawped. ~ . The Tempesta (Giorgione, oil on canvas) Venus feeds her infant son Cupid with tears. They've wandered off. He's hungry. His mother's lost the last wisps of her clothes to the bushes and clutches him to her chest like a grubby hot water bottle. He's forgotten home's sly repetitions of columns and steps. The stubby arrows he'll tote like a cottage boy's kindling are not yet invented, the hunt's not tallyhoed, and a bird's tight treble beyond the last town has riled him from sleep long before St. Francis could gather him in like a fractious bear cub or Sir Isaac learns to bend every quiver to rainbow. Here he's still just a baby, Love's weepy by-blow mouthing the skies until they prickle, deepen, and in the last town but one the leaky headed dreamers all take to their beds, briefly sadder and sweeter View ~ . Portrait of a Man with a Palm and a Paintbox Portrait of a Man Holding a Palm (Antonio Palma) Titian, 1561 Dubbed "Aretino" by an inauthentic inscription (since rubbed out), or "doctor" for your box on the sill, in you Titian has summoned a whole pharmikon of remedies that could be poison or, because he has planted them here between you and the sunset, a compendium of color. You look like a man with the cure for what ails us: a lush, patent palm frond has sprung from your hand like an oversized paintbrush to suggest that whatever may come between your room and the sky can be undone, that there's a finer hue than this one chaffing the treetops: the painter has used it to measure your features, hanging his own brush in air like a tiny horizon. Or maybe the sunset is painting you, a portrait you've turned your back on. Thus we see what it takes to work both sides of a canvas— for thrift, but also because it's still impossible to see some things together (sunset and morning, cure and fatality) while your kit of colors razes every room down to window. Shadow-box-of-all-trades, we might call it, the way some have called you more artist than doctor, though because you've left no self-portrait turned to the wall (unless it's already balancing the sill as light sashays into landscape), we have only the work of a more famous practitioner whose dates match yours, a friend who's found something in your eyes that's not quite a challenge, not quite affection, who's strained the fine dark hair back from your forehead and draped your mouth as if anything you might say (a roll call of blue? a gold prognosis?) should be kept safer than thought or at least more hidden. Yet even the trees have begun to move closer since we last considered them, are following their seedlings across the stubbled fields of the day toward an old division, a spectrum of possibilities freighting the trees with orange and indigo or fanning the whole forest out in reverse, each branch a wick to the conflagration or the swab that can stanch it. as your paintbox divides into ten twinned piazzas of color. Does this construction continue beyond the sill of our wills forever, pairing hues until your room spills into window, our gaze into yours, and we fall gaudily into each other's arms? That others mate without this, that they grapple in dusk and conceive in dusk and bear their weeping young into a place without color is inarguable, though it's easier to picture their deaths there and how we'll meet them again in some communal twilight, creatures we've always loved but whose lives remain half-hidden to those requiring sunsets of skin and passion's flare-up, hands twinned and in motion, and the prize of an eye's exact, ancestral hazel. That all this is a mixed blessing is suggested by the method of its retrieval, here a spatula fallen diagonally across your box like a little sword or tongue depressor, that which slides down the throat of each day to a red-gold conundrum while, near enough to tug, one of your hands half-shades itself in sleeve, the other sutures the cut end of a palm frond with a hue so capable we expect it to broom ceilings or cool the brows of convalescents or simply to keep painting until it's too dark to see. In this light (last dose from a painter you surely knew well— he's caught that little weariness in your eyes that measures the year, MDLXI) TITIANVS PICTOR ET has fallen from somewhere into the room. Is it your hand we see in this inscription wending its way into your portrait just as light works itself into a brush that neither makes nor holds it? As you hold us in the palm of your hand which is always another's, and from which we'll be swept into a fever of days no more nameless than you, friend, dab-handed gazer, merciful poisoner, old pleasurer. View ~ . ~ . ~ |