“Baseball and Classicism”
by
Tom Clark
Every day I peruse the box scores for hours
Sometimes I wonder why I do it
Since I am not going to take a test on it
And no one is going to give me money
The pleasure’s something like that of codes
Of deciphering an ancient alphabet say
So as brightly to picturize Eurydice
In the Elysian Fields on her perfect day
The day she went 5 for 5 against Vic Raschi
Queen Mab’s Cave, 1846 by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851)
Mientras Pablo no me vea (As Long as Pablo Doesn’t See Me) by Carmen Chami (b. 1974)
Manifest, 2015 by Scott Greene
The Couples, 2019 by Xiao Guo Hui (b. 1969)
The Minotaur, 1885 George Frederic Watts (1817–1904)
“Haymaking”
by
William Carlos Williams
The living quality of
the man’s mind
stands out
and its covert assertions
for art, art, art!
painting
that the Renaissance
tried to absorb
but
it remained a wheat field
over which the
wind played
men with scythes tumbling
the wheat in
rows
the gleaners already busy
it was his own—
magpies
the patient horses no one
could take that
from him
The Raconteur, 2019 by Ilya Milstein
Nude, 1967 by Gerhard Richter (b. 1932)
The Warrior’s Tomb, 1941 by Gertrude Hermes (1901–1983)
“A Postcard from the Volcano”
by
Wallace Stevens
Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;
And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;
And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt
At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky
Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion’s look
And what we said of it became
A part of what it is … Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,
Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,
A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.
Operation I, 1939 by Leonor Fini (1908-1996)
Life, 1988 by He Duoling (b. 1948)
Birdsong, 1893 by Karoly Ferenczy (1862-1917)
Grace Sholto Douglas, 1940 by Leslie Hurry (1909–1978)
Film poster for The Man Who Fell to Earth by Tomer Hanuka.
