Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.

Why? I think I would rather be

a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg

is starting a painting. I drop in.

"Sit down and have a drink" he

says. I drink; we drink. I look

up. "You have sardines in it."

"Yes, it needed something there."

"Oh." I go and the days go by

and I drop in again. The painting

is going on, and I go, and the days

go by. I drop in. The painting is

finished. "Where's sardines?"

All that's left is just

letters. "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of

a color: orange. I write a line

about orange. Pretty soon it is a

whole page of words, not lines.

Then another page. There should be

so much more, not of orange, of

words, of how terrible orange is

and life. Days go by. It is even in

prose, I am a real poet. My poem

is finished and I haven't mentioned

orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call

it oranges. And one day in a gallery

I see Mike's painting, called sardines.

-Frank O'Hara

The Ache of Marriage

The Ache of marriage:

thigh and tongue, beloved,

are heavy with it,

it throbs in the teeth

We look for communion

and are turned away, beloved,

each and each

It is leviathan and we

in its belly

looking for joy, some joy

not to be know outside it

two by two in the ark of

the ache of it.

-Denise Levertov

The Prediction

That night the moon drifted over the pond,

turning the water to milk, and under

the boughs of the trees, the blue trees,

a woman walked, and for an instant

the future came to her:

rain falling on her husband's grave, rain falling

on the lawns of her children, her own mouth

filling with cold air, strangers moving into her house,

a man in her room writing a poem, the moon drifting into it,

a woman strolling under its trees, thinking of death,

thinking of him thinking of her, and the wind rising

and taking the moon and leaving the paper dark.

-Mark Strand

Painters

In the cave with a long-ago flare

a woman stands, her arms up. Red twig, black twig, brown twig.

A wall of leaping darkness over her.

The men are out hunting in the early light

But here in this flicker, one or two men, painting

and a woman among them.

Great living animals grow on the stone walls,

their pelts, their eyes, their sex, their hearts,

and the cave-painters touch them with life, red, brown, black

a woman among them, painting.

-Muriel Rukeyser

Another Attempt at Rescue

And to think I had just paid a cousin twenty dollars to shovel the walk.
He and two of his buddies, still smelling of an all-nighter,
arrived at 7 am to begin their work.
When I left them a while later I noticed their ungloved hands
and winter made me feel selfish and unsure.
This ground seems unsure of itself
for its own reasons.
Real spring is still distant
and no one is trying to make themselves believe
this might last, this last unreasonable half hour.
It is six-thirty in eastern Montana and the cold
has finally given way.
The time is important not because this has been a long winter
or for the fact that it is my first here
since childhood, but because there is so much else
to be unsure of.
At a time like this
how is it that when I left only a week ago
there were three feet of snow on the ground,
and now there are none, not even a single patch
holding on in the shadow of the fence-line.
We do not gauge enough of our lives
by changes in temperature.
When I first began to write poems I was laying claim to battle.
It began with a death and I have tried to say it was unjust,
not because of the actual dying but because of what
was left. What time of year was that?
I have still not yet learned to write of war.
I have friends who speak out--as is necessary--with subtle
and unsubtle force. But I am from
this place and a great deal has been going wrong
for some time now.
The two young Indian boys who might have drowned
last night in the fast-rising creek near school
are casualties enough for me.
There have been too many
just like them and I have no way to fix these things.
A friend from Boston wrote something to me last week
about not have the intelligence
to take as subject for his poems
anything other than his own life.
For a while now I have sensed this in my own mood:
this poem was never supposed to mention
itself, other writers, or me.
But I will not regret the boys who made it home,
or the cousins who used the money at the bar.
Still, something is being lost here and there are no lights
on this street; enough mud remains on our feet
to carry with us into the house.


-M. L. Smoker

Pat's Pizza

Farnsworth's Cafe, better known as Pat's Pizza, is the heart and soul of Orono, Maine. Generations of Orono locals, as well as thousands of students at the University of Maine, have grown up on Pat's popular plain Maine fare.

I was a freshman at the University in 1960-61 when I ate my first Pat's pizza, delivered to the dorm. And I was a senior when I first started drinking legally in Pat's tap room.

But Pat's is about much more than pizza and beer. While the food is good and cheap, it's the atmosphere that people want to experience again and again. The first thing that many of my former Orono students do when they come home is go to Pat's to see who's around. It's the most popular hang-out for everyone of all ages.

As my colleague Thom Ingrahan says, "The breakfast crowd at Pat's is Orono without a university" with all the locals and regulars dishing the dirt, talking about town government, the schools, and so on."

The old wooden booths, the scarred tables, the worn floor tiles, the counter, the tap room, and Pat Farnsworth himself haven't changed much over the past forty years.

Hundreds of Orono students have worked at Pat's waiting on tables, making and delivering pizzas.

During last January's ice storm and several-day power outage, Pat's was the only place in town with power and the restaurant was packed more than usual. The whole world had gone black but Pat's had light with people inside laughing, telling stories, eating pizza and drinking beer. As Thom Ingraham said, "It was like a festival in the middle of a disaster."

Pat's Pizza remains a good-humored and human place where no one rushes the customers. It's a politically incorrect, warm environment where everyone's welcome.

For me, as well as for so many other Maniacs, Pat's is like going home to the Maine where we grew up.

-Sanford Phippen

Portland Magazine

Summerguide 1998

True Love

In silence the heart raves. It utters words

Meaningless, that never had

A meaning. I was ten, skinny, red-headed,

Freckled. In a big black Buick,

Driven by a big grown boy, with a necktie, she sat

In front of the drugstore, sipping something

Through a straw. There is nothing like

Beauty. It stops your heart. It

Thinkens your blood. It stops your breath. It

Makes you feel dirty. You need a hot bath.

I leaned against a telephone pole, and watched.

I thought I would die if she saw me.

How could I exist in the same world with that brightness?

Two years later she smiled at me. She

Named my name. I thought I would wake up dead.

Her Grown brothers walked with the bent-knee

Swagger if horsemen. They were slick-faced.

Told jokes in the barbershop. Did no work.

Their father was what is called a drunkard.

Whatever he was he stayed on the third floor

Of the big white farmhouse under the maple for twenty-five years.

He never came down. They brought everything up to him.

I did not know what a mortgage was.

His wife was a good, Christian woman, and prayed.

When the daughter got married, the old man came down wearing

An old tail coat, the pleated shirt yellowing.

The sons propped him. I saw the wedding. There were

Engraved invitations, it was so fashionable. I thought

I would cry. I lay in bed that night

And wondered if she would cry when something was done to her.

The mortgage was foreclosed. That last word was whispered.
She never came back. The family
Sort of drifted off. Nobody wears shiny boots like that now.




But I know she is beautiful forever, and lives
In a beautiful house, far away.
She called my name once. I didn't even know she knew it.

-Robert Penn Warren

Nobody Sits

Nobody sits like this rock sits.

You rock, rock.

The rock just sits and is.

You show us how to sit here

and that's what we need.

-Albert Markovski (I Heart Huckabees)

Ode to Tomatoes

The street
filled with tomatoes,
midday,
summer,
light is
halved
like
a tomato,
its juice
runs
through the streets.
In December,
unabated,
the tomato
invades
the kitchen,
it enters at lunchtime,
takes
its ease
on countertops,
amoung glasses,
butter dishes,
blue saltcellars.
It Sheds
its own light,
benign majesty.
Unfortunately, we must
murder it:
the knife
sinks
into living flesh,
red
viscera
a cool
sun,
profound,
inexhaustible,
populates the salads
of Chile
happily it is wed
to the clear onion,
and to celebrate the union
we
pour
oil,
essential
child of the olive,
onto its halved hemishpheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,
salt, it magnetism
it is the weding
of the day,
parsley
hoists
its flag,
potatoes
buble vigorously,
the aroma
of the roast
knocks
at the door,
it's time!
come on!
and, on
the table, at the midpoint
of summer,
the tomato,
star of earth, recurrent
and fertile,
star,
displays
its convolutions,
its canals,
its remarkable amplitude
and abundance,
no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers
its gift
of fiery color
and cool completeness.


-Pablo Neruda

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