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PS: apologies for the lag this week. One got lost in living rather than posting the theme

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Number 1

Number 1, Jackson Pollock


Number 1

No name but a number.
Trickles and valleys of paint
Devise this maze
Into a game of Monopoly
Without any bank. Into
A linoleum on the floor
In a dream. Into
Murals inside of the mind.
No similes here. Nothing
But paint. Such purity
Taxes the poem that speaks
Still of something in a place
Or at a time.
How to realize his question
Let alone his answer?

~Nancy Sullivan

The Street

The Street, Balthus



The Street

Across the street, the carpenter carries a golden
board across one shoulder, much as he bears the burdens
of his life. Dressed in white, his only weakness is
temptation. Now he builds another wall to screen him.

The little girl pursues her bad red ball, hits it once
with her blue racket, hits it once again. She must
teach it the rules balls must follow and it turns her
quite wild to see how it leers at her, then winks.

The oriental couple wants always to dance like this:
swirling across a crowded street, while he grips
her waist and che slides to one knee and music rises
from cobblestones--some days Ravel, some days Bizet.

The departing postulant is singing to herself. She
has seen the world's salvation asleep in a cradle,
hanging in a tree. The girl's song makes
the sunlight, makes the breeze that rocks the cradle.

The baker's had half a thought. Now he stands like a pillar
awaiting another. He sees white flour falling like snow,
covering people who first try to walk, then crawl,
then become rounded shapes: so many loaves of bread.

The baby carried off by his heartless mother is very old and
for years has starred in silent films. He tries to explain
he was accidentally exchanged for a baby on a bus, but he can
find no words as once more he is borne home to his awful bath.

First the visionary workman conjures a great hall, then
he puts himself on the stage, explaining, explaining:
where the sun goes at night, where flies go in winter, while
attentive crowds of dogs and cats listen in quiet heaps.

Unaware of one another, these nine people circle around
each other on a narrow city street. Each concentrates
so intently on the few steps before him, that not one
can see his neighbor turning in exactly different,

yet exactly similar circles around them: identical lives
begun alone, spent alone, ending alone--as separate
as points of light in a night sky, as separate as stars
and all that immense black space between them.

~Stephen Dobyns

Girl Powdering Her Neck

Girl Powdering Her Neck, Kitagawa Utamaro


Girl Powdering Her Neck


The light is the inside
sheen of an oyster shell,
sponged with talc and vapor,
moisture from a bath.

A pair of slippers
are placed outside
the rice-paper doors.
She kneels at a low table
in the room,
her legs folded beneath her
as she sits on a buckwheat pillow.

Her hair is black
with hints of red,
the color of seaweed
spread over rocks.

Morning begins the ritual
wheel of the body,
the application of translucent skins.
She practices pleasure:
the pressure of three fingertips
applying powder.
Fingerprints of pollen
some other hand will trace.

The peach-dyed kimono
patterned with maple leaves
drifting across the silk,
falls from right to left
in a diagonal, revealing
the nape of her neck
and the curve of a shoulder
like the slope of a hill
set deep in snow in a country
of huge white solemn birds.
Her face appears in the mirror,
a reflection in a winter pond,
rising to meet itself.

She dips a corner of her sleeve
like a brush into water
to wipe the mirror;
she is about to paint herself.
The eyes narrow
in a moment of self-scrutiny.
The mouth parts
as if desiring to disturb
the placid plum face;
break the symmetry of silence.
But the berry-stained lips,
stenciled into the mask of beauty,
do not speak.

Two chrysanthemums
touch in the middle of the lake
and drift apart.

~Cathy Song

Hunters in the Snow..

Hunters in the Snow, Pieter Brueghel (the elder)




Winter Landscape


The three men coming down the winter hill
In brown, with tall poles and a pack of hounds
At heel, through the arrangement of the trees,
Past the five figures at the burning straw,
Returning cold and silent to their town,

Returning to the drifted snow, the rink
Lively with children, to the older men,
The long companions they can never reach,
The blue light, men with ladders, by the church
The sledge and shadow in the twilit street,

Are not aware that in the sandy time
To come, the evil waste of history
Outstretched, they will be seen upon the brow
Of that same hill: when all their company
Will have been irrecoverably lost,

These men, this particular three in brown
Witnessed by birds will keep the scene and say
By their configuration with the trees,
The small bridge, the red houses and the fire,
What place, what time, what morning occasion

Sent them into the wood, a pack of hounds
At heel and the tall poles upon their shoulders,
Thence to return as now we see them and
Ankle-deep in snow down the winter hill
Descend, while three birds watch and the fourth flies.

~ John Berryman

Nude descending a Staircase No.2

Nude descending a Staircase No.2, Marcel Duchamp

Nude Descending a Staircase

Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.

We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh--
Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to let her parts go by.

One-woman waterall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the final stair
Collects her motions into shape.

~XJ Kennedy

House by the Railroad

House by the Railroad, Edward Hopper





House by the Railroad

Out here in the exact middle of the day,
This strange, gawky house has the expression
Of someone being stared at, someone holding
His breath underwater, hushed and expectant;

This house is ashamed of itself, ashamed
Of its fantastic mansard rooftop
And its pseudo-Gothic porch, ashamed
of its shoulders and large, awkward hands.

But the man behind the easel is relentless.
He is as brutal as sunlight, and believes
The house must have done something horrible
To the people who once lived here

Because now it is so desperately empty,
It must have done something to the sky
Because the sky, too, is utterly vacant
And devoid of meaning. There are no

Trees or shrubs anywhere--the house
Must have done something against the earth.
All that is present is a single pair of tracks
Straightening into the distance. No trains pass.

Now the stranger returns to this place daily
Until the house begins to suspect
That the man, too, is desolate, desolate
And even ashamed. Soon the house starts

To stare frankly at the man. And somehow
The empty white canvas slowly takes on
The expression of someone who is unnerved,
Someone holding his breath underwater.

And then one day the man simply disappears.
He is a last afternoon shadow moving
Across the tracks, making its way
Through the vast, darkening fields.

This man will paint other abandoned mansions,
And faded cafeteria windows, and poorly lettered
Storefronts on the edges of small towns.
Always they will have this same expression,

The utterly naked look of someone
Being stared at, someone American and gawky.
Someone who is about to be left alone
Again, and can no longer stand it.


~Edward Hirsh

The Uncertainty of a Poet

The Uncertainty of the Poet, Giorgio de Chirico

The Uncertainty of the Poet

I am a poet.
I am very fond of bananas.
I am bananas.
I am very fond of a poet.
I am a poet of bananas.
I am very fond.
A fond poet of 'I am, I am'-
Very bananas.
Fond of 'Am I bananas?
Am I?'-a very poet.
Bananas of a poet!
Am I fond? Am I very?
Poet bananas! I am.
I am fond of a 'very.'
I am of very fond bananas.
Am I a poet?

~Wendy Cope

Vase with poppies

Vase with poppies, Vincent Van Gogh

Tulips in a vase

Tulips in a vase, Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Chrysanthemums in a China vase

Chrysanthemums in a China vase, Camiller Pissarro

Vase de fleurs

Vase de Fleurs, Germain Ribot

Dahlias in a copper vase

Dahlias in a copper vase, Paul Gauguin

Flowers in a basket and a vase

Flowers in a basket and a vase , Jan Brueghel the Elder

Sweet Violets, White and Blue Violets in a Patterened Bowl

Sweet Violets, White and Blue Violets in a Patterened Bowl, Walter Sickert

Yes, yes, we will post Sickert, even if he is the serial killer.

Nude Study

Nude Study, William Etty

Alvan

Alvan, Anders Zorn

The Source

The Source, Gustave Courbet

The Delphic Oracle

The Delphic Oracle, John William Godward

Reclining Nude

Reclining Nude, Pierre Auguste Renoir

Love Locked Out

Love Locked Out, Anna Lea Merritt

Origin of the World

Origin of the World, Gustave Courbet

Death in Sickroom

Death in Sickroom, Edvard Munch

Despair

Despair, Edvard Munch

Melancholy

Melancholy, Edvard Munch

Separation

Separation, Edvard Munch

The Day After

The Day After, Edvard Munch