Painting & Sculpture

A.E. Stallings on shipwrecks, daylight robbery, and the air in 19th century Athens. 

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with…

What if, Betye, instead of a rifle or hand
grenade—I mean, what if after
the loaded gun that takes two hands
to fire, I lay down the splintered broom
and the steel so cold it wets
my cheek? What if I unclench the valleys
of my...

That was the season I couldn’t think or write indoors,
the garrulous springtime every strophe,
every felicitous story’s pulse
could only be crafted in tranquil cloisters,
illuminating belvederes, or rambling villas.
Luckily, it was an unbridled spring,
all immoderate daisies and sunlit pediments,
a bustling April, May,...

Delirium in the downtown mall today:
      Burt Reynolds! All the henna-haired girls
            sneer, while their mothers, enthralled, say,

“I saw you in this, I saw you in that–
      you were marvelous, simply...

My sweat soaked the sheets.

You used to be like everyone else

but then

the way you hurt me (fingers, teeth):

I grew accustomed to it

then I craved it

then I got bored

and other men tried to put death into my mouth.

Angelic Richie with bite...

The geometer wishes he were David
cut from stone by lightning, his mind

gyring wide into figures of space
out of time, ever gauging the shock

of the word for the pathos, ever
slinging the rock of his wound

at the sugared glass of me.
I'd rather...

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous...

1.

Details frighten me.
As the trembling blue
Strokes of
The cathedral imply

It has been there
And it has not been there
Since the thirteenth century.
Details frighten me.


2.

To live only near water.
The brush
The trees, the river.
Sunlight will not break us—
Rather
We move illumined

Return daily, Monet
Returning daily
To save...

As salmon awaken to the pulsing dawn,
he hears night heron farther down the Skagit River.

The grey sky turning to white spirals
calls winter one word blessed with distance.

In the dark, his home rests in echoing waves.
White blossoms cover willow, woodpile, the...

There was a woman who claimed to be made of rain. Dust and the water that closes around it like a pearl, like any conglomeration of past irritations. She claimed no resemblance to Venus in her half shell, or to...