Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (1981)
Emir Kusturica

Dancers in Pink, c. 1883
Edgar Degas

Convertible, Westchester, New York, 1960s
George S. Zimbel

Paris, 1953
Willy Ronis

I Fidanzati (1963)
Ermanno Olmi

Her Triumph

I did the dragon's will until you came
Because I had fancied love a casual
Improvisation, or a settled game
That followed if I let the kerchief fall:
Those deeds were best that gave the minute wings
And heavenly music if they gave it wit;
And then you stood among the dragon-rings.
I mocked, being crazy, but you mastered it
And broke the chain and set my ankles free,
Saint George or else a pagan Perseus;
And now we stare astonished at the sea,
And a miraculous strange bird shrieks at us.

William Butler Yeats

Landscape with Stars, ca. 1905-1906
Henri Edmond Cross

Having a Coke with You

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn't pick the rider as carefully
as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it

Frank O'Hara

Restaurant Coquet, Paris, 1954
Sabine Weiss

I Remember

By the first of August
the invisible beetles began
to snore and the grass was
as tough as hemp and was
no colour--no more than
the sand was a colour and
we had worn our bare feet
bare since the twentieth
of June and there were times
we forgot to wind up your
alarm clock and some nights
we took our gin warm and neat
from old jelly glasses while
the sun blew out of sight
like a red picture hat and
one day I tied my hair back
with a ribbon and you said
that i looked almost like
a puritan lady and what
i remember best is that
the door to your room was
the door to mine.

Anne Sexton

#510
Yamamoto Masao

Evadne

I first tasted under Apollo's lips,
love and love sweetness,
I, Evadne;
my hair is made of crisp violets
or hyacinth which the wind combs back
across some rock shelf;
I, Evadne,
was made of the god of light.

His hair was crisp to my mouth,
as the flower of the crocus,
across my cheek,
cool as the silver-cress
on Erotos bank;
between my chin and throat,
his mouth slipped over and over.

Still between my arm and shoulder,
I feel the brush of his hair,
and my hands keep the gold they took,
as they wandered over and over,
that great arm-full of yellow flowers.

H.D.

Figuras en el Castillo, 1920
Manuel Alvarez Bravo

Berenice Abbott, 1921
Man Ray


Tylia Perlmutter, Paris, ca. 1925
Berenice Abbott

Untitled, 1971
Ray Metzker

Untitled, New York, ca. 1950
Saul Leiter

Lella, 1948


Self-portrait with Lella, 1951
Edouard Boubat

Untitled (Redhead at Counter), Biloxi, Mississippi, 1974
William Eggleston

Elizabeth and Me, Budapest, Hungary, October 7, 1920
André Kertész

The Rooster, 1929
Marc Chagall