Art poems
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Prodigal
© Richard Jones
You could drive out of this country
and attack the world with your ambition,
A Muse of Water
© John Betjeman
We who must act as handmaidens
To our own goddess, turn too fast,
Trip on our hems, to glimpse the muse
Gliding below her lake or sea,
Are left, long-staring after her,
Narcissists by necessity;
Ellen West
© Frank Bidart
I love sweets,—
heaven
would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream ...
But my true self
The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith
© Gwendolyn Brooks
He wakes, unwinds, elaborately: a cat
Tawny, reluctant, royal. He is fat
And fine this morning. Definite. Reimbursed.
The Artist
© Amy Lowell
Why do you subdue yourself in golds and purples?
Why do you dim yourself with folded silks?
The Cab Driver Who Ripped Me Off
© Cornelius Eady
That’s right, said the cab driver,
Turning the corner to the
Hotel François 1er
© Gertrude Stein
It was a very little while and they had gone in front of it. It was that they had liked it would it bear. It was a very much adjoined a follower. Flower of an adding where a follower.
Have I come in. Will in suggestion.
They may like hours in catching.
It is always a pleasure to remember.
A Little Language
© Robert Duncan
I know a little language of my cat, though Dante says
that animals have no need of speech and Nature
abhors the superfluous. My cat is fluent. He
converses when he wants with me. To speak
Afterword
© Louise Gluck
Reading what I have just written, I now believe
I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been
slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly
but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort
sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes.
from The Task, Book I: The Sofa
© William Cowper
(excerpt)
Thou know’st my praise of nature most sincere,
Funeral Music
© Geoffrey Hill
William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk: beheaded 1450
John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester: beheaded 1470
Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers: beheaded 1483
Sounds of the Resurrected Dead Man’s Footsteps #17
© Marvin Bell
1. At the Walking Dunes, Eastern Long Island
That a bent piece of straw made a circle in the sand.
Cabin
© Anne Waldman
eviction people arrive to haunt me
with descriptions of summer’s wildflowers
how they are carpet of fierce colors
