In an Artist’s Studio
One face looks out from all his canvases, One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans: We found her hidden just behind those screens, That mirror gave back all her loveliness. — Christina Rossetti
Continue reading...read some poetry, make some art, and occasionally write my own
How to Eat a Poem
Don’t be polite. Bite in. Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that may run down your chin. — Eve Merriam
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Thanksgiving Day
Over the river and through the wood, To have first-rate play. Hear the bells ring, “Ting-a-ling-ding!” Hurrah for Thanksgiving Day! — Lydia Maria Child
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That Bright
Just the passion of painters and poets trying to catch who they think we might be. — Heid E. Erdrich
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Traveler
青山交叠如画 我的目光泼墨而过，完成一轴山水 — 乃生 《行者》 Hills and mountains fold as in a painting My gaze, pouring over like ink, completes a scroll of landscape — by Nai Sheng
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Halloween
The apples are thumping, winter is coming. The lips of the pumpkin soon will be humming. By the caw of the crow on the first of the year, Something will die, something appear. — from Maurice Kilwein Guevara “A Rhyme for Halloween”
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Arrival at Santos
Here is a coast; here is a harbor; here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery; impractically shaped and—who knows?—self-pitying mountains, sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery, with a little church on top of one. And warehouses, some of them painted a…
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Gulf View
Between the striped walls of the canyon Burns a crescent of blue water, arresting, poignant: Jewel-blue, soul of opals and sapphires; Feather-blue, stain of indigo on the peacock’s breast; Flame-blue, color that hovers above the copper-saturated drift- wood in the beach-fire. And the tall white…
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Rabbit in the Moonlight
Moonlight is sharp until I see A rabbit sitting quietly. Then wall and fence and tree and burr Grow soft and touch the night with fur. — by Frank Mitalsky
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Autumn Shade
Awakened by some fear, I watch the sky. Compelled as though by purposes they know, The stars, in the blue distance, still affirm The bond of heaven and earth, the ancient way. This old assurance haunts small creatures, dazed In icy mud, though cold may…
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Country Stars
The nearsighted child has taken off her glasses and come downstairs to be kissed goodnight. She blows on a black windowpane until it’s white. Over the apple trees a great bear passes but she puts her own construction on the night. Two cities, a chemical…
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Rabbit
Droll and erratic, a jackass rabbit jumps From form to field, or wallows in the sand Grotesquely serious, pop-eyed, waggle-eared, Fit for the prairie, born of it, beloved: A Yankee critter, sinewy, strong, and tough, To laugh at, wonder at – but not to catch.
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Reading Myself
Like thousands, I took just pride and more than just, struck matches that brought my blood to a boil; I memorized the tricks to set the river on fire— somehow never wrote something to go back to. Can I suppose I am finished with wax…
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Tapestry
It hangs from heaven to earth. There are trees in it, cities, rivers, small pigs and moons. In one corner the snow falling over a charging cavalry, in another women are planting rice. You can also see: a chicken carried off by a fox, a…
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California Hills in August
… … And hate the bright stillness of the noon without wind, without motion, the only other living thing a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended in the blinding, sunlit blue. And yet how gentle it seems to someone raised in a landscape short of rain—…
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Summer, Afternoon
This this will it always be, and why To ever argue for: here walking In its life, or sprawled, or loitering Down shallow valleys of the lawn: The trees that are there The pigeon bobbing through Its fallowgray ellipse of ground— The comfort of this…
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A Cat/ A Future
A cat can draw the blinds behind her eyes whenever she decides. Nothing alters in the stare itself but she’s not there. Likewise a future can occlude: still sitting there, doing nothing rude. — by Kay Ryan
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To Mrs K
For magic surely lurks in this, A cake that tells of vanished bliss; A cake that conjures up to view The early scenes, when life was new; When memory knew no sorrows past, And hope believed in joys that last! – Helen Maria Williams “To…
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The River
These trees and stones are audible to me, These idle flowers, that tremble in the wind, I understand their faery syllables, And all their sad significance. – R. W. Emerson “The River”
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