For hanging

A Curse--For Hanging--dw

When you hang
your painting
may the hammer scar
your wall, a hole
behind the woman's
pretty head.

Notions: Matisse, a Parrot, and the Fate of Wallace Stevens

Matisse has fallen asleep
 in a puddle of pastels.

He awakens at a vast red table
 of his own making.

A bowl of blue lemons
 becomes the center

and also a flower 
 imported from a province

of green belief arranges
 herself as another

center—head and torso
 filled with blossoms

requiring no specific pigment
 or love.

So the parrot who rouses
 the prodigal to return

disappears in the  medieval
 sun—splash of several

feathers & losses—and carries
 away Wallace Stevens

dressed in his best white suit
 of cotton, with orchids

pressed in his pockets. Beauty,
 they sing, in a tongue

only the truest believers will know.

--dw

The Museum Guard--David Hernandez

My condolences to the man dressed
for a funeral, sitting bored
on a gray folding chair, the zero

of his mouth widening in a yawn.
No doubt he's pictured himself inside
a painting or two around his station,

stealing a plump green grape
from the cluster hanging above
the corkscrew locks of Dionysus,

or shooting arrows at rosy-cheeked cherubs
hiding behind a woolly cloud.
With time limping along

like a Bruegel beggar, no doubt
he's even seen himself taking the place
of the one crucified: the black spike

of the minute hand piercing his left palm,
the hour hand penetrating the right,
nailed forever to one spot.


From A House Waiting for Music by David Hernandez

The Painting--John Balaban

The stream runs clear to its stones;
the fish swim in sharp outline.
Girl, turn your face for me to draw.
Tomorrow, if we should drift apart,
I shall find you by this picture.


From Ca Dao Vietnam: Vietnamese Folk Poetry translated by John Balaban.

It really is a hermetically sealed world, isn't it really a hermetically sealed world, isn't it really a hermetically sealed world, etc.

The Painter Rearranges the Mirrors by Cole Swensen left me intrigued and ticked. Why?

dw

Running too close?

War Photograph--Kate Daniels

A naked child is running
along the path toward us,
her arms stretched out,
her mouth open,
the world turned to trash
behind her.
She is running from the smoke
and the soldiers, from the bodies
of her mother and little sister
thrown down into a ditch,
from the blown-up bamboo hut
from the melted pots and pans.
And she is also running from the gods
who have changed the sky to fire
and puddled the earth with skin and blood.
She is running--my god--to us,
10,000 miles away,
reading the caption
beneath her picture
in a weekly magazine.
All over the country
we're feeling sorry for her
and being appalled at the war
being fought in the other world.
She keeps on running, you know,
after the shutter of the camera
clicks. She's running to us.
For how can she know,
her feet beating a path
on another continent?
How can she know
what we really are?
From the distance, we look
so terribly human.

From A Chorus for Peace: A Global Anthology of Poetry by Women

Uncle Walt and American Song

An excerpt from this essay by Whitman scholar David S. Reynolds, author of Walt Whitman's America:

Recalling the entertainment experiences of his young manhood, Whitman wrote, "Perhaps my dearest amusement reminiscences are those musical ones." Music was such a powerful force on him that he saw himself less as a poet than as a singer or bard. "My younger life," he recalled in old age, "was so saturated with the emotions, raptures, up- lifts of such musical experiences that it would be surprising indeed if all my future work had not been colored by them."

Whitman regarded music as a prime agent for unity and uplift in a nation whose tendencies to fragmentation and political corruption he saw clearly. For all the downward tendencies he perceived in society, he took confidence in Americans' shared love of music. In the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass he mentioned specifically "their delight in music, the sure symptoms of manly tenderness and native elegance of soul." As he explained in a magazine article: "A taste for music, when widely distributed among a people, is one of the surest indications of their moral purity, amiability, and refinement. It promotes sociality, represses the grosser manifestations of the passions, and substitutes in their place all that is beautiful and artistic." By becoming himself a "bard" singing poetic "songs" he hoped to tap the potential for aesthetic appreciation he saw in Americans' positive responses to their shared musical culture.

Whitman's poetry, then, was most profoundly influenced by what he called "the great, overwhelming, touching human voice—its throbbing, flowing, pulsating qualities." Of the 206 musical words in his poems, 123 relate specifically to vocal music, and some are used many times. "Song" appears 154 times, "sing" 117, and "singing" and "singers" over 30 times each. In his poems, too, he mentions no fewer than 25 musical instruments, including the violin, the piano, the oboe, and the drums. One senses a musical influence in his poem "Song of Myself," which, like a symphony, shifts between pianissimo passages and torrential, fervent ones.