will you still love me?

LUCKIES

The loop of rusty cable incises
its shadow on the stucco wall.
My father smiles shyly and takes
one of my cigarettes, holding it

awkwardly at first,
as if it were
a dart, while the yard slowly
swings across the wide sill
of daylight.
Then it is a young man’s
quick hand

that rises to his lips, he leans against the wall,
his white shirt open at the throat,
where the skin is weathered, and
he chats and
daydreams,

something he never does.

Smoking his cigarette,
he is even
younger than I am,
a brother who
begins to guess,
amazed, that what
he will do will turn out
to be this.

He recalls the house
he had
when I was born, leaning against it
now after work, the pale stucco
of memory, 1947.

Baby bottles stand near the sink inside.
The new wire of the telephone, dozing
in a coil, waits for the first call.

The years are smoke.

Reginald Gibbons (also born 1947)

“Luckies” from The Ruined Motel. Copyright © 1981 by
Reginald Gibbons. All rights reserved.

PASTORAL

If it were only still!—
With far away the shrill
Crying of a cock;
Or the shaken bell
From a cow's throat
Moving through the bushes;
Or the soft shock
Of wizened apples falling
From an old tree
In a forgotten orchard
Upon the hilly rock!

Oh, grey hill,
Where the grazing herd
Licks the purple blossom,
Crops the spiky weed!
Oh, stony pasture,
Where the tall mullein
Stands up so sturdy
On its little seed!

Edna St. Vincent Millay


PIED BEAUTY

Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise Him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

(it is interesting to me how easily children's books illustrators adopted so much from what they saw in the japanese prints. and them passed it on, generation to generation, to their students.)

perseus and the children

several days ago i talked about ethel mars and maud hunt squire. i wasn't able to find many images by them, but pk at bibliodyssey has unburied some treasures.

the couple illustrated children's books together, and pk has offered up four: 'Children of Our Town,' 'The Adventures of Ulysses,' 'The Heroes,' and 'A Child's Garden of Verse.'

i am filled with astonishment at the obvious traces of the japanese influence in these seemingly unrelated images; not a fan, kimono, or painted screen to be found.

but the wonderful line is there, along with the asymmetry, the use of large foreground framing images, even the way the water is drawn.

check 'em out. & thanks, pk.

flowers from our shores

it occurred to me this evening that though many of my favorites from this era are women, i show you the work of more men than women.

well... there are a lot more to choose from, in the west, and in the east there are only men to choose from. but i want to remedy that a bit tonight. i've mentions some of these women before, but here's a little context.

Edna Boies Hopkins studied under Dow at the Pratt Institute in 1899 and 1900, learning block printing and Dow's principles of composition. She then taught design at the Veltin School for Girls in New York City.

Hopkins taught the wood-block technique to Ethel Mars (1876-1956), a friend from the Art Academy of Cincinnati in Ohio, who moved to New York in 1900.











Mars in turn taught Maud Squire (1873-1955), also an art student from Cincinnati living in New York. By 1906 each of the three women had settled in Paris, and together they formed the nucleus of a group of American print makers.

In 1910 they were joined by Margaret Jordan Patterson, who had studied at Pratt in 1895, and although she had not enrolled in Dow's classes, she credited him as her teacher.


Patterson, who was also a textile designer, learned the wood-block technique from Mars.1



Magazine Antiques, Sept, 1996 by Lindsay Leard

(margaret jordan patterson, mjp, edna boies hopkins, ebh, ethel mars, maud squire, mjp, mjp.)