| Muses Review Sample Poems |
| 1. Fox Hunt After Winslow Homer's painting of the same name "the most interesting part of my life is of no concern to the public" by Gary Lehmann From the late 1870s on, Winslow Homer changed. He moved to the coast of Maine, became more reclusive, only went to town occasionally to get his mail. There were rumors of a failed romance. His art career was assured by then, but something had changed profoundly. Moodily, he returned to his studio at Prout's Neck. With indifference, he picked up his brushes. A long red patch appearedon the white canvas, perhaps a fox. The fox pranced lively toward berry- laden winter bushes. He darkened the fur, defined the ears, and buried the feet in snow. Water appeared crashing on a hostile ocean beach at the horizon, like the winter of his soul. As he touched up the legs and ear tips of the fox in black, he saw at once that the blank right side of the canvas needed some menacing presence. In bold strokes, he scrubbed in two crows. Up close and hovering for an attack, their beaks are hungry for a mid-winter meal. Suddenly, six more appeared coming over the hill in hot pursuit. Their feathers are jagged and ill-kempt. Winslow Homer sat back in his chair exhausted. He had been painting for twelve hours straight. 2. Hobos by Gary Lehmann We were warned not to go near the railroad tracks, behind the convent where the bums hung out. Clustered around a burning oil barrel, winter and summer, they were the evil male twins to the nuns who occupied the grounds up toward the highway, just a bunch of silent men in black. One day after school, I took my bicycle and hid in the bushes near the tracks. Slowly, I crept up on them like an indian scout. There they stood, warming their hands, waiting for the New York Central to slow for the big crossing, giving them a chance to get on or get off. Only a stone's throw from our suburban world, they stayed put, never crossed our tracks. Only a few hundred feet from their cardboard village, we never crossed their tracks to help them, never sent in the Red Cross or the Community Chest. We didn't care. They found their way to this oasis and left when the spirit moved them. There was nothing there. Since they disturbed no one, no one disturbed them. Only the New York Central cared if once in a while they missed their footing on the stones and left a bloody patch along the rails. 3. Curious Heads by Gary Lehmann Art is the willful misrepresentation of life for emphasis "Look you, Vasari. Is that not the artist Leonardo? What is he doing chasing after that strange looking freak with his notepad in hand? Do you see him there? "He is drawing, my friend. I asked him about this curious habit some time ago. He told me that beauty and ugliness are just two halves of the same human image. Only the imagination suggests otherwise." "Whatever can you mean? Surely beauty and ugliness are both totally different." "Leonardo claims not. To him the same thoughts whirl about within the human skull. The same emotions take hold and work their charms. But the artist, with the eye of imagination, sees representations only." "Like what?" "Well, in Giovannina, who lives at the hospital, he sees the face of fantasy. In Giuiliano da Maria, the doctor, he sees the face of the faithful steward. The toothless old man, being fed in the courtyard, shows the face of avarice. The grotesque monkey-faced woman represents the face of mockery." "Won't this practice cause him to treat people unfairly? If he knows they are not what they look like, why does he persist in caricature?" "He does it for the same reason we all do it, to make sense of life. He paints them as they look, not as they are. Have you not seen his Mona Lisa? Do you think for one minute that she is beatific --- all the time?" "Well no, but...." "So you want to make snap judgments about people based on how they look, but you don't want the artist to make a science of this study to perfect himself?" "I just think it is unseemly for a man such as Leonardo to chase after odd-looking people in the streets of Florence." "And so you will damn all artists and yet wonder at their visions of humanity. Which of you is the hypocrite?" 4. Rethinking the New World from Scratch by Gary Lehmann June, 1843 Concord, Massachusetts weather cool, slightly overcast Bronson Alcott loaded a wagon with tools for the garden. Then he loaded up his family -- Louisa May, the two younger girls, and mother. The elder daughter, Anna, 11, walked because there was no room in the wagon. It was a long walk, 14 miles. A few other Concordians joined in. Their destination was an old colonial farmhouse, much smaller than their town residence. Here they intended to start a utopian farm community called Fruitland. It was called this because they intended to live off the fruit of the land. Bronson naturally made room for his bust of Socrates. There would have to be some rules at the ideal farm. For example. There would be no milk consumed. It rightfully belongs to the calf. There would be no wool taken. It is the lawful property of the sheep. Rules were limited to those that were absolutely essential to living a moral life. The list of rules was long, but no one was deterred from joining up. Cotton and sugar could not be allowed. These were the evil outcome of slave labor. Linen, made of the flax plant, would be their sole source of cloth. This idea seemed fine on a slightly overcast day in June. Oxen and cattle were to be used humanely, not enslaved to the plow. No fertilizer of any kind was allowed. It was the property of the animal that produced it. Some outsiders claimed that Bronson Alcott was a wooly-heady Transcendentalist. By December, the community disbanded, but not because anyone objected to the rules. 5. An Ominous Noise in the Forest by Gary Lehmann I recall a time when I was a boy walking down an Adirondack road in the middle of winter. A scatter of crystalline snow fell from the pines as a gentle wind blew through the forest. It was well below zero. As I crunched over the new fallen snow, loud cracks, like gunfire, sounded all around me. I realized that I was listening to the pine sap in the trees releasing internal pressure, freezing and expanding within the tree. The juices that made the tree grow were locked in place and had to give way. If they did not, they would break the passageways the tree was going to need come spring. These loud discharges were part of a great plan. Now, I see that I was the boy, the tree, the sap, the crack, the road, and the forest all at once. The boy still lives in me, but now I know myself to be much more than a boy in the woods. Back then, I was only the boy in this story. 6. Refrigerator Box by Gary Lehmann It probably dropped off the truck as the storm started A cloudburst as big as the sky fell without warning. There! It loomed up in front of me on the highway a refrigerator box pirouetting in the sodden roadway, a Disney elephant wearing a giant tutu and a flower Like all natural malignity, it appeared without notice a deer crossing the road, a foul ball hit off a tired pitcher Dancing and spinning on its pointed edge -- so blithe. Yet, it could have dealt me a deadly blow without notice or, a foot to one side, passed by like a windy plastic bag. |
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