The Artist

Mr. T.
     bareheaded
          in a soiled undershirt
his hair standing out
     on all sides
          stood on his toes
heels together
     arms gracefully
          for the moment
curled above his head.
     Then he whirled about
          bounded
into the air
     and with an entrechat
          perfectly achieved
completed the figure.
     My mother
          taken by surprise
where she sat
     in her invalid's chair
          was left speechless.
Bravo! she cried at last
     and clapped her hands.
          The man's wife
came from the kitchen:
     What goes on here? she said.
          But the show was over.

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by William Carlos Williams, 1954

Balms

Hemmed in by the prim
deodorizing stare
of the rare-book room,
I stumbled over,
lodged under glass, a
revenant Essay on Color
by Mary Gartside, a woman
I'd never heard of, open
to a hand-rendered
watercolor illustration
wet-bright as the day
its unadulterated red-
and-yellow was laid on
(publication date 1818).

Garden nasturtium hues,
the text alongside
explained, had been
her guide. Sudden as
on hands and knees
I felt the smell of them
suffuse the catacomb
so much of us lives in ---
horned, pungent, velvet -
eared succulence, a perfume
without hokum, the intimate
of trudging earthworms
and everyone's last end's
unnumbered, milling tenants.

Most olfactory experience
either rubs your nose
in it or tries to flatter
with a funeral home's
approximation of such balms
as a theology of wax alone
can promise, and the bees
deliver. Mary Gartside
died, I couldn't even
learn the year. Our one
encounter occurred by chance
where pure hue set loose
unearthly gusts of odor
from earthbound nasturtiums.

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by Amy Clampitt

To Paula in Late Spring

Let me imagine that we will come again
when we want to and it will be spring
we will be no older than we ever were
the worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud
through which the morning slowly comes to itself
and the ancient defenses against the dead
will be done with and left to the dead at last
the light will be as it is now in the garden
that we have made here these years together
of our long evenings and astonishment

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by W. S. Merwin

First Reader

I can see them standing politely on the wide pages
that I was still learning to turn,
Jane in a blue jumper, Dick with his crayon-brown hair,
playing with a ball or exploring the cosmos
of the backyard, unaware they are the first characters,
the boy and girl who begin fiction.

Beyond the simple illustration of their neighborhood
the other protagonists were waiting in a huddle:
frightening Heathcliff, frightened Pip, Nick Adams
carrying a fishing rod, Emma Bovary riding into Rouen.

But I would read about the perfect boy and his sister
even before I would read about Adam and Eve, garden
     and gate,
and before I heard the name Gutenberg, the type
of their simple talk was moving into my focusing eyes.

It was always Saturday and he and she
were always pointing at something and shouting "Look!"
pointing at the dog, the bicycle, or their father
as he pushed a hand mower over the lawn,
waving at aproned Mother framed in the kitchen doorway,
pointing toward the sky, pointing at each other.

They wanted us to look but we had looked already
and seen the shaded lawn, the wagon, the postman.
We had seen the dog, walked, watered, and fed the animal
and now it was time to discover the infinite, clicking
permutations of the alphabet's small and capital letters.
Alphabetical ourselves in rows of classroom desks,
we were forgetting how to look, learning how to read.

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by Billy Collins, 1989

Song

A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.

There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.

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by Seamus Heaney, 1979