Poems about art

July 16, 2009

To the left is Wotan, a sketch I made after seeing a homeless man on the west side of Balboa Park about a decade ago. Of course he's named for The Wanderer in Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle.

He reminds me of Robert, the homeless man in my story "The Sudden Unexpected Sweetness of the Orange," which was recently read at the Avo Playhouse by Veronica Murphy of Write Out Loud.

I promised readers of my Theatrescene column, Curtain Calls, that I would post an example of the poetic form known as a conceit. Mine follows

Address to an Artisan

Crocheter, weaver of cloth,

you sometimes fashion words as well.

Fashioner of words and phrases,

of tangibles and intangibles,

how does one fashion life?

You, often maker of knobbied stuff,

you weave a lifetime’s threads.

Weaver at the inner loom,

the warp and woof of what you weave

by far surpass your intricate words.

The woven cloth and mitered phrase —

you do create a thousand arts.

Creator of intangibles, your textured life —

the row-by-row — fails still to show

what master thread interlaces all.

And while we're speaking of form, here's my award-winning sonnet:

For a Young Poet

You ask my words to move like weighted boughs

luxuriant with summer’s fecund blooms;

to give you shade sometimes and to avow

that autumn’s words more wisdom bear than June’s.

My words invoked crawl slowly forth like snails

that overnight have journeyed on my wood,

in darkness leaving me a mucous trail

crisscrossing truths I thought I understood.

To pull my leaves apart in search for truth

would be to find them bloodless as your own;

their rending would not wisdom give your youth,

nor knowledge of the summers I have known.

Our roots for now commingle, each in each,

and I learn more from you than I can teach.