Very similar, very simile— a smile, a gesture, a mark on the air to wave hello, goodbye, to throw a kiss across the rainbow distances. “The word love,” writes syphilitic Paul Gauguin, in his journal in Tahiti, “I’d like to kick whoever invented it in the teeth.” Gauguin the realist in paradise, painting cinnamon women in native floral outlines in real two-dimension, beautiful flat faces. Then the counterargument:…… More »
Already, before dawn, the calendar cold moon still clear, sparkle of ice here and there, and almost out of hearing, he is singing, which is really, likely, countersinging, interspersed with chip calls, then for a while, except for the hilltop wind riffling the white-laced pines, silence, as if he’s disappeared through a door left open in the air. Yet by noon his first-blood brilliant coloring is fire against the snow, skilled in…… More »
Yes, a river is a tree, a tree a river, built by source and branchings,like the river in Byzantium called Maeander, with its tributaries and blind offshoots.Like that elm, closer to home, that earlier every year loses leaves,then towers in isolation, each divided limb finding shape inside the air.And this rain slip-slipping down the window, capillary, fragmentary, bled,and bleeding out, a kind of river delta, spreading like …… More »
National Portrait Gallery
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The Civil War
A 150th-anniversary commemorative issue, with Atlantic work by Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and others. Read more › |
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