1182. Poem For Nelson - Sylvia Miles

September 22, 2004

For Nelson: not a week has passed 

since you left us. That I haven’t

Missed your guileless southern smile

Your pile of shoes on the brick

Wall in the ivy-lined house

On the cobble-stoned square

In the Meat Packing District.

Had I known you wouldn’t stay.

I’d never have chastised you for

Your eye in the video camera,

And not on the world we were

Inhabiting so enjoyably.

You were there before these

Nosy hordes, Nelson—they

Will never know the joy you

Engendered in all of us, and how much

We all loved you!

           Your own Sylvia Miles 

1181. For Sylvia - Nelson Sullivan

For Sylvia, a million kisses.

Few are hits: most are misses.

What chance has a superstar

To hear the far-off praises?

She glides in starlight radiance,

A nebula of gravity

Dazzling! points of light condensed

To diamond clarity.

She sparkles in the universe

Aglow with life and wit and mirth

Her levity’s alarming! In short

She’s simply charming. She conquers

Where the strong are won’t

Merely to survive. 

1180. Castilian - Elinor Wyle

 

Velasquez took a pliant knife

And scraped his palette clean,

He said, “I lead a dog’g own life

Painting a king and queen.”

He cleaned his palette with oily rags

and oakum from Seville wharves,

“I am sick of painting painted hags

And bad ambiguous dwarves.”

“The sky is silver, the clouds are pearl,

Their locks are looped with rain

I will not paint Maria’s girl

For all the money in Spain”

H washed his face in water cold,

His hands in turpentine;

He squeezed out colour like coins of gold

And colour like drops of wine.

Each cooler lay like a little pool,

On the polished cedar wood,

Clear and pale and ivory-cool

Or dark as solitude

He burnt the rags in the fireplace

and leaned from the windows high;

He said, “I like that gentleman’s face

Who wears his cap awry.”

This is the gentleman, there he stands,

Castilian, sombre-caped,

With arrogant eyes, and narrow hands

Miraculously shaped. 

1179. Georgia O’Keeffe, “From the Faraway, Nearby,” 1937 - Camille Carter

Make no bones about it—

                           or better yet, make bones:

sand-borne, sun-bleached, bald-faced bones

naked but for a Southwest sky.

I began picking up bones

                              because there were no flowers.

More than enough to fill your pockets, a treasure

trove—in plain sight—atop sage-covered plains.

In the picture taken by your lover, you pose with them—

                            nestling them, caressing them, pressing them:

brush of bone against your cheekbone. Your eyes rolled back

in ecstasy—momentarily, you were someplace else.

Place was a metaphysics; the word “skeleton” meant “home.”

                           He will not follow you there. You return alone

to New Mexico, to your catacomb, curio cabinet stuffed

with canvases, with corpses.

It’s the summer of 1936 when you receive his letter:

              I worry ... the landscape makes you lonely ... 

But it is his logic that makes you lonely. You will not

bother to reply. Outside at dusk,

you paint the desert, the broken fence, a single

              chicken bone. Suddenly you are struck

to think how elemental they turned out to be,

your life’s preoccupations.

Where in the prism of  the painting antlers bloom,

              as ascendant and gnarled as branches,

sits the alien skull of the once-majestic stag,

his eye-sockets hollow but for your projections.

One night you dream you see yourself as if from far away,

              asleep and slumped on sand dunes the color of cream.

Walking backwards you watch with fascination as your body

fades into a hillock’s hump, is stifled by a sun-drenched sheet.

1178. The Dance - William Carlos Williams, 1944

 

In Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess,

the dancers go round  they go round and

around, the squeal and the blare and the

tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles

tipping their bellies (round as the thick-

sided glasses whose wash they impound)

their hips and their bellies off balance

to turn them. Kicking and rolling about

the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those

shanks must be sound to bear up under such

rollicking and measures, prance as they dance

in Breughel’s great picture, the Kermess.

1177. Seance - Wislawa Szymborska

 Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

Happenstance reveals its tricks.

It produces, by sleight of hand, a glass of brandy

and sits Henry down beside it.

I enter the bistro and stop dead in my tracks.

Henry—he’s none other than

Agnes’s husband’s brother,

and Agnes is related

to Aunt Sophie’s brother-in-law.

It turns out

we’ve got the same great-grandfather.

In happenstance’s hands

space furls and unfurls,

spreads and shrinks.

The tablecloth

becomes a handkerchief.

Just guess who I ran into

in Canada, of all places,

after all these years.

I thought he was dead,

and there he was, in a Mercedes.

On the plane to Athens,

At a stadium in Tokyo.  

Happenstance twirls a kaleidoscope in its hands.

A billion bits of colored glass glitter.

And suddenly Jack’s glass

bumps into Jill’s.

Just imagine in the very same hotel.

I turn around and see—

it’s really her!

Face to face in an elevator.

In a toy store.

At the corner of Maple and Pine.

Happenstance is shrouded in a cloak.

Things get lost in it and are found again.

I stumbled on it accidentally

I bent down and picked it up.

Once look and I knew it,

a spoon from that stolen service.

If it hadn’t been for that bracelet,

I would never have known Alexandra.

The clock? It turned up in Potterville.

Happenstance looks deep into our eyes.

Our head grows heavy.

Our eyelids drop.

We want to laugh and cry,

it’s so incredible.

From fourth-grade home room to that ocean liner.

It has to mean something.

To hell and back,

and here we meet halfway home.

We want to shout:

Small world!

You could almost hug it!

And for a moment we are filled with joy,

radiant and deceptive.

1176. Late Abed - Archibald MacLeish

Ah, but a good wife!

To lie late in a warm bed

(warm where she was) with your life

suspended like a music in the head,

hearing her foot in the house, her broom

on the pine floor of the down-stairs room,

hearing the window toward the sun go up,

the tap turned on, the tap turned off,

the saucer clatter to the coffee cup . . .

To lie late in the odor of coffee

thinking of nothing at all, listening . . .

and she moves here, she moves there,

and your mouth hurts still where last she kissed you:

you think how she looked as she left, the bare

thigh, and went to her adorning . . .

You lie there listening and she moves –––

prepares her house to hold another morning,

prepares another day to hold her loves . . .

You lie there

thinking of nothing

watching the sky . . .