Young Farmers, 1914

August Sander

He found that it was no good trying to tell
what happened that day. Everything he said
seemed fictional the moment that he said it,
the rain, the scent of her hair, what she said
as she was leaving, and why it was important
for him to explain that the car had been parked
under eucalyptus on a hillside, and how velvety
and blurred the trees looked through the windshield;
not, he said, that making fictions might not be
the best way of getting at it, but that nothing he said
had the brute, abject, unassimilated quality
of a wounding experience: the ego in any telling
was already seeing itself as a character, and a character,
he said, was exactly what he was not at that moment,
even as he kept wanting to explain to someone,
to whomever would listen, that she had closed the door
so quietly and so firmly that the beads of rain
on the side window didn't even quiver.

from  September Notebook: Stories
Robert Hass

Portrait of Gerti Schiele, 1909
Egon Schiele

The Kiss IV, 1902
Edvard Munch

Notes on a Handkerchief's Edge

                       I
Like your eyelids' commotion
the blood moves at the nape
the nape of your neck, when down
your back there pours the marvel
your combing reveals.
                       II
In my hand the traits
of your heart, memento
of when you were here
in the hand that I bite.
                      III
The butterfly encumbering
your sky each evening
with its shadow's
transience, lights on your shoulder
to look like a rose.
                     IV
Your spotless soul,
your lazy essence of an
angel! Hot as flame
your ear of a tigress
rests against my cheek.
                      V
            The fiery
flower lies tattered in the gardens.
You finger the branches. And dive
in a thicket of shade, in love
with the dark.

Leonardo Sinisgalli