Snow Crystal, ca. 1910
Wilson Alwyn Bentley

How Simile Works

The drizzle-slicked cobblestone alleys
of some city;
                            and the brickwork back
of the lumbering Galapagos tortoise
they'd set me astride, at the "petting zoo". . . .

The taste of our squabble still in my mouth
the next day;
                            and the brackish puddles sectioning
the street one morning after a storm. . . .

So poetry configures its comparisons.

My wife and I have been arguing; now
I'm telling her a childhood reminiscence,
stroking her back, her naked back that was
the particles in the heart of a star and will be
again, and is hers, and is like nothing
else, and is like the components of everything.

Albert Goldbarth

Women Seated on the Grass, ca. 1880s
Thomas Eakins

The Two Sunshades, 1902
Édouard Vuillard

Adelaide Crapsey

Among the bumble-bees in red-top hay, a freckled field of
              brown-eyed Susans dripping yellow leaves in July,
                             I read your heart in a book.

And your mouth of blue pansy--I know somewhere I have
              seen it rain-shattered.

And I have seen a woman with her head flung between her
             naked knees, and her head held there listening to the
             sea, the great naked sea shouldering a load of salt.

And the blue pansy mouth sang to the sea:
                          Mother of God, I'm so little a thing,
                          Let me sing longer,
                          Only a little longer.

And the sea shouldered its salt in long gray combers hauling
               new shapes on the beach sand.

Carl Sandburg

Girl with Plant, 1960
Richard Diebenkorn

Untitled, New York #15, 1997, 1997
Mitch Epstein