Meadow Flowers (Goldenrod and Wild Aster)
By Poetry Issue 95
—————–after a painting by John Henry Twachtman Like a gate to Paradise, illumined as how fluttering angels might appear, the meadow seems misty while at the same time impossibly bright. But there looks to be hardly any way into such purity of color, through the many layers of lavender and yellow. And yet a few…
Read MoreKermes Red
By Poetry Issue 73
Called crimson, called vermilion—“little worm” in both the Persian and the Latin, red eggs for the carmine dye, the insect’s brood crushed stillborn from her dried body, aswarm in a bath of oak ash lye and alum to form the pigment the Germans called Saint John’s blood— the saint who picked brittle locusts for food,…
Read MoreVerdigris
By Poetry Issue 73
Not green as new weeds or crushed juniper, but a toxic and unearthly green, meet for inking angel wings, made from copper sheets treated with vapors of wine or vinegar, left to oxidize for the calligrapher. When it’s done, he’ll cover calfskin with a fleet of knotted beasts in caustic green that eats the page…
Read MoreMinium
By Poetry Issue 73
The monk stipples the page with convoluted trails of lead toasted rust red, brick red, the color first used for rubric and for miniature. Three thousand tiny dots prick the initials, as if the text itself were pierced with nails, red edging each green, black, or yellow letter to embolden the story of Christ’s dolor…
Read MoreOrpiment
By Poetry Issue 73
King’s yellow for the king’s hair and halo, mixed if the monastery can’t afford the shell gold or gold leaf to crown the Lord, to work the letters of his name, the Chi-Ro, in trumpet spirals and triquetras, the yellow a cheap and lethal burnishing, the hoard not gold but arsenic and sulfur. The Word…
Read MoreTransit Alexander: A Round
By Essay Issue 78
The following is a chapter in Richard Rodriguez’s new memoir, Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography, forthcoming this October from Viking. GOD formed you of dust from the soil. I was a sort of an afterthought. A wishbone. He blew into our nostrils the breath of life and there we were. You were his Darling Boy…
Read MoreThe Open Window
By Poetry Issue 83
In Pierre Bonnard’s The Open Window the artist looks outward from his modest living room. It is summer, the heat baking the orange on the grill-like wall. To the right, a woman is resting in a chair, escaping as she can the sizzling midday air in which even her quizzical black cat blurs in the…
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