Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2012. Oil on canvas, 12″ x 12″. “Cirlce” series.
after Brueghel the Elder and W.H. Auden
We know what the father did, aimed too high.
And the son dared too much, while the ploughman and his stout horse just got on with business.
But what about the ocean, Brueghel’s dull green sea, spread flat as a bolt of fabric?
A few spits of foam around the boy who cannonballed headfirst, legs askew, poor zapped mosquito. A shrug of polite ripples and the water takes him in without the protest of a splash— Brueghel’s brush applied like a narcotic to smooth the waves.
They did get it wrong sometimes, the masters. Even a painted ocean can only take so much.
We know now what our ambition does to seascapes—empties them of coral and of coho, fills them with glacial melt and sends the waters raging.
Two autumns ago, after our home had broken up, my child and I were left in a rugged way. If I were to paint it with tempera on wet gesso, on a wall in some palace chamber, it would be a man carrying his daughter who is holding a lantern for him. This autumn we are settling in to a new house; but that same pain—as if the season, not us, were remembering it— comes prying. Today, the same day I begin the pills I’ve asked the doctor for, whatever space in the mind they might afford, I’m starting a small project, a simple rack for my daughter’s closet. It’s a habit of making things, passed to me by my father, but scant measure to the skills of the man who made a perfectly scaled four-poster bed for a sister’s doll, as well as the life-size bedroom where for years I slept.
Looking for a layer against the season’s first chill, I reach for a folded sweater on the high shelf of my closet, one I’ve never worn before. Though it’s thoroughly worn: shot-gunned by moths, a ragged suture I sewed where the V-neck meets the breastbone. It was twenty years ago, this time of year, beginning of the season for sweaters, my father died. How strange now to feel this sweater he wore, one that I remember him in, cling to me tight as old clothes I’ve outgrown.
Still I keep it on, something I’ll work within like this house where we now live, with room for the two of us, but small enough we have to imagine hard how best it can be filled. Which is why I’ve sawn a white pine board, and will sand it, varnish, sand again; and measure and drill, to fix the hooks to hang the jackets, hoodies, and her prized cow-print pajamas, now floor-strewn like debris flown from the bed of a pickup. She may or may not pick up on the idea, also passed down, that one small thing works into another, larger one: a jacket on a hook, a hook on a board, fastened to a wall holding up a roof, enclosing the ongoing, unfinished project of a house. The work, the daily intentions— and the luck (all the apartments shelled to ruins by one-eyed missiles)—the luck to even have any of this— careless, rich, flamboyant chance.
They say a child might grow up to be an artist if his sandcastle means nothing until he brings his mother over for a look.
I’m that way with my wife. Little things that happen don’t mean much until I report back from the front.
I ran into Rick from the gift shop. The post office flag is at half-mast. I counted the cars on a freight train.
Who else in the world would put up with such froth before it dissolves in the surf?
But early this morning while I was alone in the pool, a Vatican-red cardinal flashed down from the big magnolia and landed on the deck right next to where I was standing in the water.
Here was an event worth mentioning, but I decided that I would keep this one to myself. I alone would harbor and possess it.
Then I went back to watching the bird pecking now at the edge of the garden with the usual swivel-headed wariness of a bird.
I was an unobserved observer of this private moment, with only my head above the water, at very close range for man and bird, considering my large head and lack of feathers.
A sudden rustling in the magnolia revealed the vigilant gray-and-pink female, the mate with whom he shared his life,
but I wouldn’t share this with my wife, not in the kitchen or in bed, nor would I disclose it as she made toast or worked the Sunday crossword. Indeed, I would take the two cardinals to my grave.
It was just then that she appeared in a billowing yellow nightgown carrying two steaming cups of coffee, and before she could hand one to me, of course, I began to tell her all about the cardinals,
he pecking in the garden, she flitting from branch to branch in the tree, as if we were the male and female birds, she with the coffee and me in the pool,
leaving me to make sure I divulged every aspect of the experience, including the foolish part about my plan to keep it all a secret, and that really dumb thing about the grave.
Many of us poets have been asked to go someplace, often somewhere we have never been, nor would ever think to go, to read our poems out loud.
Audiences gather in these places to hear us read our poems out loud and to see what we are wearing, which is often part of the disappointment.
Someone said that professors get paid to read, but poets get paid to read out loud.
Julian Barnes said: they don’t come to hear you read your work. They want to know what you had for breakfast.
I think it’s a little of both, as in Galway Kinnell’s poem called “Oatmeal,” which is both beautiful and informative regarding what the poet likes for breakfast.
It’s about having breakfast with John Keats and he must have read that poem out loud many times and in many places where he had never been before
because we have only a handful of good poems, so we read the same ones time after time, if only to please the crowd,
and the poems come and go, repeating like the painted animals on a carousel, only without the up-and-down music.
And the audiences watch them go by, the oatmeal poem coming around again and one about a man in a hammock, and a poem with an uncle in a single-engine plane.
And here’s the white horse again with the orange plume and the wooden teeth, as all the decorative little mirrors make their rounds.
Because of a clerical error for which the temp agency sincerely apologizes, today I’m a tour guide at “Jimmy’s Sistine-Chapel Warehouse Replica
and Gift Shop!” where I try to avoid laser-pointing to the Biblical genitals while children and art critics ask about pigment-to-egg ratios of contemporary fresco restoration.
These people saved for weeks for a tour with an eloquent expert named Albert, and I won’t tell them they got me instead. Though my father warned,
“Don’t trust someone who never says, I don’t know,” when the critics question if I’m sure the panel overhead is titled “Then God Makes a Red Planet,” I think not of my father,
but of confident, informed Albert and shout, “Contrapposto!” which is a word I remember from art appreciation class. “Why is that naked man building a boat?”
a child asks about Noah, and I say, “God wanted a re-do.” When I point to Samson’s rippling thighs, I am embarrassed I wore shorts.
How often have I wished to exchange body parts—legs, stomachs—with a passerby? One who could walk tall surrounded by all these fearless nudes.
The children are confused about God ready to touch his index finger to Adam’s, assembling him from dirt.
“God should have used gold or rubies,” a blond boy says, “but who am I to criticize?” A girl asks, “So Adam is our great-great grampa?” “If so,” I say, “Our great-great-great grampa
is earth.” The critics point at me, and I point at the ceiling, where, as usual, the divine and the human point at each other.
Featured Art: Polar Chroma Midnight by John Sabraw
“Tickets, please,” he calls out, “Tickets!” and I think, Hang on, I know him, the conductor who shuffles toward me down the aisle, this big guy, pink- cheeked, coppery buttons on his dark blue suit, his blue cap with a short sharp brim jammed down over reddish hair, shirt collar disappearing
beneath his curly red beard, look how he keeps his feet set wide like a sea captain, sways in the nonplace of our constant motion, as I heard a French philosopher call it, the steady-as-she-goes of this racketing NJ Transit train, his ticket nippers going click-click, click-click, poor morning light catching
the pixie dust of ticket snips sprinkled behind him as he calls out again, “Tickets, tickets,” coming closer now, not asking but naming what he wants, and there’s something I want to tell him after this shock of recognition, startled awake by a world made strange again, but is this
really the place to say, You know, you look just like Joseph Roulin the postman, Van Gogh’s friend, his neighbor he painted five or six times back in 1889 and you can go see down in Philly at the Barnes, then relate how Roulin sorted the mail each day at the train station in Arles where Van Gogh used to go to send
paintings home to Theo, how Roulin cared for him when he cut himself, wrote letters to his family, welcomed him into his own, made Van Gogh’s life a little better, probably a little longer, though the conductor I imagine is not a son of Arles, though maybe of Manalapan, but up close I see
his badge says JOE, his sapphire eyes are filled with delight, filled with deep light, just the way Van Gogh painted them, as I’d like to tell him in this moving moment we share when he says “Tickets” once more and then—Click-click—punches mine and then—“Here you go”—hands it back
since I’ll need it to board the AirTrain at Newark, but because this train keeps rattling along, he keeps walking, calls out again, clicks his nipper once, twice, just because, and that’s when I spot it, there at his coat hem, how it glints and burns in the dusty light, that smudge of sunflower yellow.
Featured Art: Green Fish About to Eat the Fish Hook Wall Art by The Lazy Artist Gallery
William Merritt Chase painted numerous versions of fish still lifes, many of which were quickly purchased by museums across the country. Because of the popularity of these works, the artist worried that he would be remembered only “as a painter of fish.” —placard, Art Institute of Chicago
The real thing rots. Corrupts, Decays, time-lapses, hollow to holes.
But yours—immortal, silver-scaled, so round— (Why should its roundness be wrenching?)
Realer than the real.
You were afraid this was what they’d remember you for. Afraid—as if there were somehow more than this.
Here one sees, forever, how it could fill the hand— How it would feel, filling one’s hand.
Knowing everything fades—youth, love—doesn’t excuse using red lake in a painting you plan to sell. Red lake is the bad boyfriend of pigments; red lake invented ghosting. That bastard Whistler would use it, take the money, then ignore the outraged complaints that rained down later when the red faded away without a trace. Colors that don’t last are called fugitive.
So many ways to make pigment—dirt, rocks, bugs plucked from cactus and crushed. If pigment, then art. We so want to believe that art preserves. Oh, over the centuries art may lose a nose, an arm or two. “Very fragile, penises,” Alice Neil said, sitting below the statue, but the medium itself, the stone, the paint, shouldn’t be the agent that betrays.
Some betrayals are worse than others. Poor Seurat, with his complicated theory of optics, where the brain blends tiny dots of color. Its demonstration, his La Grande Jatte masterpiece, used, for its intensity, zinc yellow. Within a few years it faded to dull ochre, passion to affection to indifference. By that time, mercifully, Seurat was dead.
Pigments that last may come from minerals ground to powder. Lapis lazuli, only found in the mountains of Afghanistan, is expensive, cinnabar can poison you with mercury. Other pigments, red lake, for one, are organic and we know the problem there all too well, don’t we, being organic ourselves.
Seurat didn’t know, and Whistler didn’t care. But Van Gogh? Paintings of iris and of roses, three of each, those six paintings the whole exhibit. White roses on a blue tablecloth, blue iris against a white wall. Yet that tablecloth, that wall, were pink, the roses shot with red, the iris were purple. The red lake is gone. Surely he didn’t know? But there’s a letter: “Paintings fade like flowers,” he wrote to Theo. “All the more reason to boldly use them too raw, time will only soften them too much.” Where is your first love today? Your second?
Featured Art: Nude Figures by Cape Creus by Salvador Dalí
Circling above bare limbs, like Dalí’s wild and articulate capes, black wings undulate. Raucous hundreds settle and splat their stench. A murder of crows, a give-a-fuck mob, stirs the air above ash and oak and hackberry, milling and loud with news: day heralds, unwelcomed Cassandras. Dawn light pinched by a crow’s beak, pieces of light falling everywhere, bright meat that the crow pecks, strips away.
The crows know my neighbor’s face. Knowledgeable birds, they know the way I hurry each morning, the way my eyes try to read their dark signs: articulate smoke, curtains of a confession booth. Blessing? Pardon? Mercy? The stories say that crows suffer scorched wings, that they are cursed for stealing from the gods. But the stories, as always, err, wind-running, wings wide, a-glide on a slide of air, black bodies, bituminous-black, cosmos-black rising to soar. There is no damnation in their dizzying speed, the break-wing improvisations of their flight. God–blessed and black, their sharp notes strike my skull like hailstones or chunks of sky, dark bodies that lift my eyes and scorn gravity, a lesser law.
As the stone shrinks, the form expands. —Michaelangelo
It’s like sculpting in reverse, learning about love: Here’s a Maiden or Aphrodite or Venus, naked and polished or is it the Doryphorus or David or . . . Isn’t s/he nice? The Ideal in spirit and form? Miss or Mister Universe!
Then, in reverse, as you learn about the apple of your eye in revelations you can hardly believe, (marble with veins like that! granite with such cracks!), the stone chipped away chips back chip by chip, and chunk by chunk, all superfluous fugitives reuniting, and not without the dusty air re-ringing with the tap-tapping of chisel and mallet, point and hammer,
refilling all the subtle negative spaces that defined the planes and rhythms— mound and hollow, ridgeline and gap— and the warmth that passed from the sculptor’s hands into the work, all his perseverance, passes back . . . until before you grandly stands, unhewn and cold, a breathless, glacial block of stone, Lovelessness now reappointed whose last words (whispered with chiseled lips lastly parted) were, “Darling, are you disappointed?”
Featured Art: In the Spirit of Hoffmann by Paul Klee
With each remission she’d take it up again, her search for proof her great love Edward Lear was influenced by the Irish poet Mangan, and while we weeded she would bend my ear with her latest evidence: an owl here, elsewhere a pussycat or a beard, a wren. I was polite, but it was pretty thin. There was one word, though, some nonsense confabulation that occurred in Mangan first, so odd that it could not be accident. Then cancer, like a weed we’d missed, some snapped-off root or dormant seed. The last cure killed her. I would give a lot to be able to recall that word.
Winner, New Ohio Review Poetry Contest selected by Tony Hoagland
By Michael Pearce
Featured Art: In the Valley of Wyoming, Pennsylvania (Interior of a Coal Mine, Susquehanna) by Thomas Addison Richards, 1852
The old barrel warehouse across the street had a ceiling so high there was weather inside. Henry Gutierrez lived there—they said he’d been there since before the war, though they never said which war. He worked at Anger’s garage all day rebuilding engines, then came home and slept a few hours, and when he woke up after dark he’d knock back a bowl of cereal and a couple beers.
If you looked over there at midnight you’d see brilliant flashes coming from inside, silent explosions, like lightning trapped in a thunderless cage. But it was only Henry’s arc welder, he worked all night fusing together sheets and scraps of steel until they seemed to breathe and shake and prance and strike a noble pose. He built animals, mostly horses, and he said he knew he’d finished one when he found himself talking to it.
One time Uncle Jack, my father’s brother, invited Henry to his church, the one where they forgive you for anything as long as you let Jesus into your heart and drop a twenty in the basket. But Henry knew there was no forgiving his sins, and it made him sick to talk about the people he’d injured then listen to the other craven souls tell him he was absolved. He said he had his own way of atoning that was mostly about wrestling with steel.
My favorite scene in Body Heat has nothing To do with the intricate plot That William Hurt and Kathleen Turner Devise to kill her rich, oppressive husband. My favorite scene, maybe ten seconds long, Shows Hurt getting into his car as an antique Convertible drives by, a fully costumed clown At the wheel, waving. Hurt stares, slightly Bewildered, while the clown passes and disappears. That’s it. Cut to Hurt and Turner in another Sweaty sex scene and post-coital planning, The foregone noir conclusion closing in. Meanwhile, Since we know there are no meaningless details In art, we keep expecting the clown to reappear Or at least figure indirectly yet clearly in the action. Like Chekhov said—if there’s a gun on the table In act one, it had better be fired by act three. But no, the clown is random, there and gone, an odd, Unrelated moment like any of the ones that pass us Every day and we barely notice Because life isn’t art, isn’t revised for coherence, Not until our lives collapse around us Like a circus tent in flames And we begin to look for the alarm we missed.
I mean the excitement level was just about in negative numbers as my sister’s basketball team lost its seventh straight and after it the girls are jumping up and down in total glee genuine happihappihappiness the reason? they broke the magic number ten in the losing score they didn’t actually break it but they finally made it to that number no sense of perspective in art too you have to see my sister’s painting of the flour mill with water wheel the central subject of which is a frog amidst the water lilies
Featured Art: A Gentleman Who Wanted to Study the Habits of Bees too Closely, plate 6 from Pastorales by Honoré Victorin Daumier
“La créateur est pessimiste, la création ambitieuse, donc optimiste.” —René Char
Because I feared I’d only make a mess Sticking yellow pom-poms onto black ones, Or bungle wings as I tried to shape the white Pipe-cleaners into an outline of flight, I never opened this kit I got one Christmas In my stocking—a joke from my sister: Create A Critter. Since I’m cleaning house I could throw it away. But all I need To make 2 Fuzzy Bees are glue and scissors. Everything’s here—the velvet-tipped feelers, Button noses, and eyes with moving pupils. Ages 6 and Up—well, that’s me, isn’t it? And as an Adult, too, I can Supervise Myself. So why do I still hesitate? If I make a bad bee I can toss it out. Look at this package. The cellophane’s intact, Directions printed on the cardboard backing. Even the little loose eyes seem to twinkle Inviting me to stick them to the heads Where they belong. Yes, they’re Choking Hazards, But I’m alone right now, no cats or babies, And the dining room table is cleared of junk. And so I do it. Soon my Fuzzy Bees Are finished, bouncing on their wire legs, Looking up at me, cute as their photos, Ready to begin their lives as . . . what? What have I done? I’ve given them existence. Their wings will never lift them to the sky, Their red noses will never scent a rose, But look at them! Ambitious, optimistic.
In those clouds figures ignite, shadows are visitable outlines at the back of rooms—I have a club and pointer holding them upright, or I am ill-dressed and need to be given a blue shirt, a red shirt, something deep offsetting the plain strangeness no one ‘has’ (but betting it) any plans nor I fixate on a tromp de l’oeil can tell you
A dog barks in the patio, he is stuck forever in a moving position; seeming delicate wings on the sky tip-top, the lit approaches gather up their meanings to take them home or canvas tells itself without dementia, though I stand looking like a crazy without wheels
All the patio given to itself without reprieve, the nice ones smiling you know it’s really sincere, the caustic ones wheeling and twirling intention on their fingers: from the corners where the dancers have no experience – you will be swallowed up in dark ideas of art
In the painting of the young couple kissing on a bench in a museum hallway I’m the subject of the portrait hanging on the wall behind them. I’m wearing the blue velvet jacket of an eighteenth-century Prussian cavalry officer standing beside a white horse that’s too large to be accurate. Though I’m rendered with lifelike precision. Obviously, I couldn’t have served in the eighteenth-century Prussian cavalry. I don’t speak German, and was born centuries late. I’m not the first person to pay a famous artist to be in a painting. Though I wanted to be the man being kissed. Unfortunately, my famous artist didn’t believe a girl that lovely would kiss me in public. I offered photographs of previous lovers but unless one was kissing me on a bench in a museum hallway his answer was no. That’s unfair. Otherwise I’m pleased with the painting. The couple kissing, I suspect, also paid to be in the painting. Though I’m certain they were strangers. Her eyes are open, peering at where we might stand admiring the painting. Instead of resting on his cheek, the palm of her hand is pushing, proving that while she desired to live forever in art, her desire didn’t include him. I once fell thirty-seven feet from a railroad bridge into a river. Riding the ambulance to the hospital is when I decided to pay a famous artist to put me in a painting. What brought the woman to the painting is something I’ve often fantasized about. The oxygen mask’s elastic strap pinched the back of my neck. I kept the discomfort to myself.
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