Homage to John Frederick Peto

Fitfully in pictures disappearing now,

They are not toys but, rather, tiny horses

In the parade of youth: polish, spit, and display

In fire companies throughout our country.

All in green we went out rioting.

Lute music damasked the commercial radio,

And girls knew everything.

Old friend, I remember your first wife.

She brought a loom into our world.

We turned the music up to drown its sound.

Now I am face down in a disappearing picture.

I would know Christina Rossetti in a minute but not you.

Such is my skill set,

Blazon of a pathos soon abandoned.

Muted extraordinary radiance,

Complicated if not impeded

By many things, most of them

In heaps where stone is stone,

Where wood is wood at close range,

Makes a fair portion of mind at midday

In desert mountains hard against my home.

Any ornaments for the poor man’s store?

Any moments of leisure at the fish-house door?

I could show you rain just before the rain

And a black dog sniffing earthquake.

We die. Our children do not know us. We die.

I pray real prayers to a star too old

To climb these mountains up into the blue.

A loop of string in the free space otherwise,

And no, and more beautiful to see indigo

Buntings taking back the sky to me.

Littleness sometimes even resembling sunlight

Overflows with colors, with intervals

Like wingspans the wind drills of a Sunday.

To enter a flower is to find a child

Not one’s own unharmed.

Our Lucie has a loop of string.

Time will come again to talk perfection,

A succession of creatures in midair.

I won’t be there.

I’ve been given back the sky that was gone:

Five colors of rain, five new colors.

Haphazard constellation of midges and old flowers

Blows through the garden shambles as slowly as the sun,

Vision somehow keeping time with itself so vision

Shows the kindness of a moment to the man

Seated beside roses planted here by his own hand

In the shade of a first heaven and the quick confidence

Of his humanity’s evanescent song.

Creation’s a funny word.

I think of noises rounding a corner

Becoming names, and then a child for each

Of the names climbs down the sun.

Creation’s the soul of haphazard.

I was old. I was young. I was old again.

Anymore Johnny, all I feel is fine.

Translator's Notes:

Q & A: Donald Revell

Can you tell us a little about John Frederick Peto and why—as well as how—your poem pays homage to him?

John Frederick Peto (1854–1907) was an American artist born in Philadelphia. His father was a merchant of firefighting equipment in that city, which figures a bit in my poem’s first stanza. There’s something deeply moving to me about the gaps that turn out not to be gaps at all between fathers and sons. I think often of Charles Ives’s father playing cornet in the Union Army’s marching band. And I think of my own father, who never learned to read but was the first to urge reading upon me.

Peto did contribute work to a few exhibitions in several cities, including Cincinnati, New Orleans, and St. Louis; but his first one-man show, at the Brooklyn Museum, did not occur until 1950.

I like to think that knowing something of Peto’s work would indeed be a benefit to anyone reading my poem. And I must confess that I’d be very impressed indeed, because I myself only came upon Peto’s work fairly recently. I was beginning to think about cover art for a collection of my poems called A Thief of Strings and decided to leaf through one of my favorite art books, Robert Hughes’s American Visions. And there I saw my first Peto, a beautifully minimal collage made from string, a key, and a picture of Abraham Lincoln. I was thrilled, and knew I had found a friend.

Can you say more about how “Creation’s a funny word”?

The phrase “Creation’s a funny word” is my ars poetica in miniature. Peto’s art is made almost entirely from nothing he can be said to have “made,” and yet it is his. Thus can art sometimes achieve greatness through a candid humility and unmediated delight in something found. I cannot claim ever to have experienced such delight, but I sure do admire it and rejoice in it. Peto and William Blake would get along, I believe.

Is the poem actually addressed to Peto?

My poem is not really addressed to Peto. Rather, I wanted to write one of my own poems as if I were, for a little while, John Frederick Peto but still living my life. The poem was written entirely outdoors in my garden, but while I was out there (over the course of several mornings) I tried to be Peto the entire time.

So who is being addressed when you say, “Old friend, I remember your first wife”?

For some years now, every occasion or subject for a poem has been an instance, sometimes sudden, of friendship. I responded to Peto and to his images and language because they seemed immediately intimate to me . . . i.e., they befriended me at once. In their spareness, they made a friendship space. And one friendship never fails to call all friendships to mind. Probably explains why I hold the “Wednesday” chapter of Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers to be a latter-day gospel . . . probably why I find Coleridge, sweet editor of one of the first real literary magazines, “The Friend,” to be a patron saint. (There’s nothing friendlier in all the canon than his “Conversation Poems.”) And so, while writing in the garden this poem about friend Peto, my oldest and dearest friend, poet/scholar Norman Finkelstein, came instantly to mind, along with the summer his first wife came to live in Binghamton (where Coleridge had once imagined a utopian community!) along with her enormous loom. Perhaps it was the strings in Peto’s pictures that brought the loom to mind.

And that striking last line, what do you mean by that?

I guess I’m saying farewell to Peto and showing him out through the garden gate, with mutual assurances that all is well.

Source: Poetry (April 2010)