Images---Art and Literature

fluke of lies, eager to me   Tails crew the garden to  Ff Everything, a cold day   No, it’s air conditioning   The garden breathes cold at night   What color is it, the air?   Black. Any day now Someone    Will have stolen the cat again   Oh, for pity’s sake. Excellent   Squishy eyes , loquat   Livermore labs will be calling   Any day now     SF, Oct. 18, 1997  

  Instructions on Not Giving Up by Ada Limon More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

 

 Bruce Nauman as a fountain. 1966

 

  John Singer Sargent. Portrait of Thomas E. McKeller. ca 1919

  John Singer Sargeant. Thomas E. McKellar. detail