After Years

Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer's retina
as he stood in the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.

Ted Kooser

Rose Hobart, c. 1936
Joseph Cornell

Untitled (Jean with Wire Mesh), 1936
Max Dupain

Lovers, Budapest, 1915
André Kertész

Paris Street, 1960
Imogen Cunningham

U.S. 97, South of Klamath Falls, Oregon, July 21, 1973


Broad Street, Regina, Saskatchewan, August 17, 1974


Trail's End Restaurant, Kanab, Utah, August 10, 1973

Stephen Shore

Untitled
Garry Winogrand

Tampa, Florida, 1970
Lee Friedlander

Dancing, Waltz, Two Models, Plate 197
from Animal Locomotion, 1887
Eadweard Muybridge

         Lover of endless disappointments with your
collection of old postcards, I'm coming! I'm com-
ing! You want to show me a train station with its
clock stopped at five past five. We can't see inside
the station master's window because of the grime.
We don't even know if there's a train waiting on
the platform, much less if a woman in black is
hurrying through the front door. There are no other
people in sight, so it must be a quiet station. Some
small town so effaced by time it has only one veiled
widow left, and now she too is leaving with her
secret.

____


          I knew a night owl who dreamed of being a
star of country music. O cruel fate! O vale of tears!
We drank whiskey in coffee cups in late-hour dives
while the juke box spinned her favorites. She fed me
forked pieces of steak while my hand strayed under
the table. The choirboy counterman's big ears
turned crimson. She, with eyes veiled, head thrown
back, so that my next bite hung in midair. I had to
stretch my neck all the way to take a nibble.
          What was I to do? The madness of it was so
appealing, and the night so cold.

____


          The time of minor poets is coming. Good-by
Whitman, Dickinson, Frost. Welcome you whose
fame will never reach beyond your closest family,
and perhaps one or two good friends gathered after
dinner over a jug of fierce red wine . . . while the
children are falling asleep and complaining about
the noise you're making as you rummage through
the closets for your old poems, afraid your wife
might've thrown them out with last spring's
cleaning.
          It's snowing, says someone who has peeked
into the dark night, and then he, too, turns towards
you as you prepare yourself to read, in a manner
somewhat theatrical and with a face turning red,
the long rambling love poem whose final stanza
(unknown to you) is hopelessly missing.

                           --After Aleksandar Ristovic

from The World Doesn't End

Charles Simic

The Photograph of a Girl

I have your likeness here: you were like this.
Light swears by shadow here, that on a day
And in a place (but tells not where it is
Or when) you are to be supposed this way.

Or as some king, to whose golden use the sun
Must stamp new images to sanction trade,
Would you enrich me with a single coin
Where others, with many, have much commerce made?

Or do you tend me some security
For time, that when I come to you, we'll stay
Alone for just such time as this (though he
That took it, stands but twenty feet away?)

I doubt it is a parable of time:
How love can make an angle with the sun
To trap time on a page, forcing the same
To other time, and without running, run.

But I alone, and you in this flat land
Remain. That time and place you have abstracted
Will turn and die upon my turning hand:
With twice dying, time has some price exacted.

Howard Nemerov

Dora Maar, 1936
Man Ray

Loves of a Blonde (1965)
Milos Forman

Ratcatcher (1999)


Gasman (1997)
Lynne Ramsay

Pool, Dusk, Florida, 1978
Joel Meyerowitz

Self-portrait, 1915
Imogen Cunningham (with Roi Partridge)

Dream, 1910
Imogen Cunningham

Kitchen Stories (2003)
Bent Hamer

Ballad of a Soldier (1959)
Grigori Chukhrai

Your footsteps follow not what is outside the eyes, but what is within, buried, erased. If, of two arcades, one continues to seem more joyous, it is because thirty years ago a girl went by there, with broad, embroidered sleeves, or else it is only because that arcade catches the light at a certain hour like that other arcade, you cannot recall where.

from Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino

Head of a Girl, ca. 1918
Amedeo Modigliani

Charulata (1964)
Satyajit Ray

Apur Sansar (1959)
Satyajit Ray

Pather Panchali (1955)
Satyajit Ray

Ireland, 1979
Harry Callahan

The Man Without a Past (2002)
Aki Kaurismaki

Eleanor, 1947


Eleanor, Chicago 1948


Eleanor, 1953
Harry Callahan

Yi Yi (2000)
Edward Yang

Sansho the Bailiff (1954)
Kenji Mizoguchi

The Cranes Are Flying (1957)
Mikhail Kalatozov

Vodka Lemon (2003)
Hiner Saleem

On the Hill
Winslow Homer

Floating Weeds (1959)
Yasujiro Ozu

A Geisha (1953)
Kenji Mizoguchi

A Room with a View (1985)
James Ivory

The Young Housewife

At ten AM the young housewife
moves about in negligee behind
the wooden walls of her husband's house.
I pass solitary in my car.

Then again she comes to the curb
to call the ice-man, fish-man, and stands
shy, uncorseted, tucking in
stray ends of hair, and i compare her
to a fallen leaf.

The noiseless wheels of my car
rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as i bow and pass smiling.

William Carlos Williams

Tokyo Story (1953)
Yasujiro Ozu

A Story of Floating Weeds (1934)
Yasujiro Ozu

Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)
Ingmar Bergman

Night Landscape, 1969-71
Richard Pousette-Dart

Woman in White, 1923
Pablo Picasso

Gadjo Dilo (1997)
Tony Gatlif

Starlings, Autumn 2002
Edward Dimsdale

After the Shower, n.d.
Edward Mitchell Bannister

Woman and Cats, 1962
Will Barnet

My Life To Live (1962)
Jean-Luc Godard

jesus, etc.

jesus, don't cry
you can rely on me honey
you can combine anything you want

i'll be around
you were right about the stars
each one is a setting sun

tall buildings shake
voices escape singing sad sad songs
tuned to chords strung down your cheeks
bitter melodies turning your orbit around

don't cry
you can rely on me honey
you can come by anytime you want

i'll be around
you were right about the stars
each one is a setting sun

tall buildings shake
voices escape singing sad sad songs
tuned to chords strung down your cheeks
bitter melodies turning your orbit around

voices whine
skyscrapers are scraping together
your voice is smoking
last cigarettes are all you can get
turning your orbit around

our love
our love
our love is all we have

our love
our love is all of god's money
everyone is a burning sun

tall buildings shake
voices escape singing sad sad songs
tuned to chords strung down your cheeks
bitter melodies turning your orbit around

voices whine
skyscrapers are scraping together
your voice is smoking
last cigarettes are all you can get
turning your orbit around

last cigarettes are all you can get
turning your orbit around
last cigarettes are all you can get
turning your orbit around

from yankee hotel foxtrot -
wilco

The Seventh Seal (1957)
Ingmar Bergman

Subway Lovers, New York, 1949
Arthur Leipzig

Portrait of Andre Breton with spectacles, 1924

(Author unknown)


All the Schoolgirls Together

Often you say making a mark in the earth with your heel as
          the wild rose blooms in a bush
Wild one seemingly made only of dew
You say The whole sea and the whole sky for a single
Victory of childhood in the country of dance or better for a

          single
Embrace in a train corridor

Going to the devil with rifle shots on a bridge or better

Yet for a single timorous word
Such as must be said while gazing at you
By a blood-stained man whose name goes far from tree to
          tree
Who keeps going in and out among a hundred birds of snow
Where then is it nice
And when you say it the whole sea and the whole sky
Scatter like a cloud of little girls in the yard of a strict
          boarding school

After a dictation in which The heart takes

Was perhaps written The heart aches

-Andre Breton