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Classic and Contemporary Poetry
THE DIORAMA PAINTER AT THE MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, by KAREN SWENSON Poet's Biography First Line: His enormous hands / with fingers long and white Last Line: As violently foreshortened as a life. Subject(s): Museums; Nature; Paintings And Painters; Art Gallerys | |||
His enormous hands, with fingers long and white as skeletons of polar bear paws, work back from real earth and plants posed in the foreground toward the perspective of distance and illusion. Off the twilight corridors the windows open their unenterable dreams onto landscapes that seem to a city child's eye melodramas of color and contour - behind a stuffed cougar with one kit the long perspective falls away to badlands melting layers of ice-cream cake colors. These scenes perfect, unreal, and absolutely true as rooms bright behind footlights the wise child, knowing neither place, believes. At the end of his life he left two windows for the children, never seen but heard scampering in the halls like squirrels over drifted leaves in the park: beyond a fox's night eyes - his mouth a warbonnet of chicken feathers - the moon-lined pitch of the farmhouse gable where we all lie ignorant of the scenes dwelling outside our sleep in darkness; in a tall, narrow window down the hall, a sequoia, the base a dressmaker's dummy of real bark over wire, soars to the one dimension of his craft, the perspective of the whole tree - 500 years of growth rings into 6 feet - as violently foreshortened as a life. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...HISTORICAL MUSEUM, MANITOULIN ISLAND by LISEL MUELLER AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM by RICHARD ALDINGTON THE DOLLS MUSEUM IN DUBLIN by EAVAN BOLAND A PARIS BLACKBIRD by LAURE-ANNE BOSSELAAR AT THE MUSEE RODIN IN PARIS by LAURE-ANNE BOSSELAAR TULIPS AND ADDRESSES by EDWARD FIELD THE HEAD ON THE TABLE by JOHN HAINES IN GALLERIES by RANDALL JARRELL HOMAGE TO P. MELLON, I.M. PEI, THEIR GALLERY AND WASHINGTON by WILLIAM MEREDITH |
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