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![[WOMAN AND WINDOW DISPLAY] by George Eastman House.](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3189/2986883373_d8ecbf5d50.jpg?v=0)
Dying day pinches the tot
He grabs my pen and beads
And plays into my hands
His father’s skull glistens
Across his wife’s white arms
The past bursts on a flower
And softly erases its bulb
We hear this going on all around
Night packs the traffic in cotton
And 1st Ave. fruit stands in opal
It is his first day to hurl a toy
But a gray torch rises in the future
Like a pair of scissors
The dark unravels towards
As I return to my newspaper
from Stones (1969)
Woman and Window Display: photo by James Jowers, 1968 (George Eastman House Collection)
1st Ave: photo by James Jowers, 1966 (George Eastman House Collection)
The top James Jowers photo reminds me quite a bit of paintings by Kenneth Hayes Miller, a largely forgotten New York City painter with famous teachers and famous students, who taught at the Art Students League. Miller’s Fourteenth Street paintings, especially those of women in and around shop windows, which were painted in a High Renaissance-derived style, shared a lot more feeling with Paul Delvaux than with Reginald Marsh, for instance, who was one of his students. I discovered Miller when I was hunting around for an MA thesis topic and I’ve always been glad that I made his acquaintance and had the opportunity to dig deep. The bottom photo is just so 1st Avenue.
ReplyDeleteCurtis,
ReplyDeleteI was happy to find these shots. So atmospheric, reflective of time and place, as you say. The dates of the photos exactly bracket the date of the composition of the poem (1967).