When I Paint My Masterpiece, song lyrics by Bob Dylan

 I PAINT MY MASTERPIECE
lyrics by Bob Dylan

Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble
footprints are everywhere
You can almost think that you’re seein’ double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs
Got to hurry on back to my hotel room
Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece
She promised that she’d be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece

Oh, the hours I’ve spent inside the Coliseum
Dodging lions and wastin’ time
Oh, those mighty kings of the jungle, I could hardly
stand to see ’em
Yes, it sure has been a long, hard climb
Train wheels runnin’ through the back of my memory
When I ran on the hilltop following a pack of wild geese
Someday, everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody
When I paint my masterpiece

Sailin’ round the world in a dirty gondola
Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!

I left Rome and landed in Brussels
On a plane ride so bumpy that I almost cried
Clergymen in uniform and young girls pullin’ muscles
Everyone was there to greet me when I stepped inside
Newspapermen eating candy
Had to be held down by big police
Someday, everything is gonna be diff’rent
When I paint my masterpiece

CREDIT: Copyright © 1971 by Big Sky Music; renewed 1999 by Big Sky Music. Visit the author’s website: bobdylan.com.

PAINTING by Bob Dylan, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

contemporary literature, one, poem by Charles Bukowski

contemporary literature, one (excerpt)
by Charles Bukowski

…I saw some newspapers
on the floor
I was out of writing
paper
had long ago hocked 
my typewriter
I noticed that 
each page of the
newspaper had a wide white
margin around the 
edge
I had a pencil
stub
I picked up a 
newspaper and with
the pencil stub
I began to write words 
on the edge
sitting in the doorway
freezing in the moonlight
so that I could
see 
I wrote in pencil 
on all the edges 
of all the newspapers 
in that shack…

SOURCE:“contemporary literature, one” appears in Charles Bukowski‘s collection Dangling in the Tournefortia (1981), available at Amazon.com.

IMAGE: “Pop Art Bukowski” by Terry Collett. Prints and cards available at redbubble.com.

Enter to win Bradley Wind portrait of Charles Bukowski

In honor of the 20th anniversary of Charles Bukowski’s passing — the author left this world on March 9, 1994 — we are raffling off this original 18×18″ watercolor portrait of Bukowski by Bradley Wind. If you’d like your name entered into the drawing, just send an email with your contact info to silver@silverbirchpress.com with RAFFLE in the subject line. We promise to blindfold ourselves when we pick the winner — which we’ll select on Sunday, March 9, 2014. (For the record, this artwork is from our personal collection, acquired after the portrait appeared in the Silver Birch Press Bukowski Anthology.)

Stay tuned for a week of giveaways as we count down to the 20th Anniversary of Hank’s departure and pay tribute to the great writer!

Nocturne, poem by Jennifer K. Sweeney

NOCTURNE
by Jennifer K. Sweeney

There is a blue city in mind
constructed slantways
 
along a rippling canal, 

clean and unpeopled but for a musician
 
who plays a harp without strings. 

The city has one chair
 
where he sits by the broad strokes of water. 

A lone streetlight tends
 
its blue arc of light. 

A Persian door. A zeppelin sky.
 
The world filters through 

his empty frame as he plucks the air.
 
Maybe you hear a song or maybe you don’t. 

That is the choice we are always making.
***
Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of two poetry collections: Salt Memory (Main Street Rag, 2006), available at Amazon.com, and How to Live on Bread and Music (Perugia Press, 2009), available at Amazon.com. Visit the author at jenniferksweeney.com. This remarkable poet offers private instruction and poetry critiques. Learn more here.

PAINTING: “La page blanche” (“The white page”) by René  Magritte (1967). Learn more at masterworksfineart.com.

Inventing a Horse, poem by Meghan O’Rourke

INVENTING A HORSE
by Meghan O’Rourke

Inventing a horse is not easy.
One must not only think of the horse.
One must dig fence posts around him.
One must include a place where horses like to live;

or do when they live with humans like you.
Slowly, you must walk him in the cold;
feed him bran mash, apples;
accustom him to the harness;

holding in mind even when you are tired
harnesses and tack cloths and saddle oil
to keep the saddle clean as a face in the sun;
one must imagine teaching him to run

among the knuckles of tree roots,
not to be skittish at first sight of timber wolves,
and not to grow thin in the city,
where at some point you will have to live;

and one must imagine the absence of money.
Most of all, though: the living weight,
the sound of his feet on the needles,
and, since he is heavy, and real,

and sometimes tired after a run
down the river with a light whip at his side,
one must imagine love
in the mind that does not know love,

an animal mind, a love that does not depend
on your image of it,
your understanding of it;
indifferent to all that it lacks:

a muzzle and two black eyes
looking the day away, a field empty
of everything but witchgrass, fluent trees,
and some piles of hay.
***
“Inventing a Horse” appears in Meghan O’Rourke’s collection Halflife (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2007), available at Amazon.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Poet, essayist, and memoirist Meghan O’Rourke was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1976.  She is a graduate of Yale University and holds an MFA in writing from Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina.  From 2005-2010 O’Rourke was poetry co-editor for the Paris Review, and in 2000 she was a fiction editor for the New Yorker.  Since 2001 she has been a contributing writer for the online magazine Slate. O’Rourke’s books of poetry include Halflife, which was a finalist for Britain’s Forward First Book Prize, and most recently Once.  She is also the author of the memoir The Long Goodbye, a chronicle of mourning written after the death of her mother.  She lives in Brooklyn, New York. (SOURCE: poetryfoundation.org)

IMAGE: “”Uma Horse” by Nomad Art and Design, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

Giving a Manicure, poem by Minnie Bruce Pratt

GIVING A MANICURE
by Minnie Bruce Pratt

The woman across from me looks so familiar,
but when I turn, her look glances off. At the last
subway stop we rise. I know her, she gives manicures
at Vogue Nails. She has held my hands between hers
several times. She bows and smiles. There the women
wear white smocks like technicians, and plastic tags
with their Christian names. Susan. No, not Susan,
whose hair is cropped short, who is short and stocky.
This older lady does my hands while classical music,
often Mozart, plays. People passing by outside are
doubled in the wall mirror. Two of everyone walk
forward, backward, vanish at the edge of the shop.
Susan does pedicures, pumice on my heels as I sit
on the stainless-steel throne. She bends over, she
kneads my feet in the water like laundry. She pounds
my calves with her fists and her cupped palms slap
a working beat, p’ansori style. She talks to the others
without turning her head, a call in a language shouted
hoarse across fields where a swallow flew and flew
across the ocean, and then fetched back to Korea
a magic gourd seed, back to the farmer’s empty house
where the seed flew from its beak to sprout a green vine.
When the farmer’s wife cut open the ripe fruit, out spilled
seeds of gold. Choi Don Mee writes that some girls
in that country crush petals on their nails, at each tip
red flowers unfold. Yi Yon-ju writes that some women
there, as here, dream of blades, knives, a bowl of blood.
***
“Giving a Manicure” appears in Minnie Bruce Pratt’s collection The Dirt She Ate: New and Selected Poems (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), available at Amazon.com.

PAINTING: “Diversity on New York City Subway” by Betsy Horn, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Prints available at etsy.com.

The Lake, poem by Sophie Cabot Black

THE LAKE
by Sophie Cabot Black

Day and night, the lake dreams of sky.
A privacy as old as the mountains
And her up there, stuck among peaks. The   whole eye
 
Fastened on hawk, gatherings of cloud or stars,
So little trespass. An airplane once
Crossed her brow; she searched but could not find
 
A face. Having lived with such strict beauty
She comes to know how the sun is nothing
But itself and the path it throws; the moon
 
A riddled stone. If only a hand
Would tremble along her cheek, would disturb. Even the elk
Pass by, drawn to the spill of creeks below—
 
How she cannot help abundance, even as it leaves
Her, as it sings all the way down the mountain.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Raised on a small New England farm, poet Sophie Cabot Black received a BA from Marlboro College and an MFA from Columbia University. Black’s collections of poetry include The Misunderstanding of Nature (1994), which won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, and The Descent (2004), which won the Connecticut Book Award. Black’s poetry has been anthologized in Best American Poetry and Never Before: Poems About First Experiences (2005).  Her honors include the Grolier Poetry Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s John Masefield Memorial Award.

PHOTO: “Evening, McDonald Lake, Glacier National Park (Montana)” by Ansel Adams (1942).

Imaginary Number, poem by Vijay Seshadri

IMAGINARY NUMBER
by Vijay Seshadri 

The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
is not big and is not small.
Big and small are
 
comparative categories, and to what
could the mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
be compared?
 
Consciousness observes and is appeased.
The soul scrambles across the screes.
The soul,
 
like the square root of minus 1,
is an impossibility that has its uses.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Vijay Seshadri is the author of Wild Kingdom (1996), The Long Meadow (2004) — both published by Graywolf Press — and The Disappearances (HarperCollins India, 2007).

Painting by Anton Zanesco

The Invisible Birds of Central America, poem by Craig Arnold

THE INVISIBLE BIRDS OF CENTRAL AMERICA
by Craig Arnold

The bird who creaks like a rusty playground swing
the bird who sharpens the knife         the bird who blows
on the mouths of milk bottles         the bird who bawls like a cat
like a cartoon baby         the bird who rubs the wineglass
the bird who curlicues         the bird who quacks like a duck
but is not a duck         the bird who pinks on a jeweller’s hammer
They hide behind the sunlight scattered throughout the canopy
At the thud of your feet they fall thoughtful and quiet
coming to life again only when you have passed
Perhaps they are not multiple         but one
a many-mooded trickster         whose voice is rich
and infinitely various         whose feathers
liquify the rainbow         rippling scarlet
emerald indigo         whose streaming tail
is rare as a comet’s         a single glimpse of which
is all that you could wish for         the one thing
missing         to make your eyes at last feel full
to meet this wild need of yours         for wonder

PAINTING: “Le Printemps” by René Magritte (1965)

Nocturne, poem by Jennifer K. Sweeney

NOCTURNE
by Jennifer K. Sweeney

There is a blue city in mind
constructed slantways
 
along a rippling canal, 

clean and unpeopled but for a musician
 
who plays a harp without strings. 

The city has one chair
 
where he sits by the broad strokes of water. 

A lone streetlight tends
 
its blue arc of light. 

A Persian door. A zeppelin sky.
 
The world filters through 

his empty frame as he plucks the air.
 
Maybe you hear a song or maybe you don’t. 

That is the choice we are always making.
***
Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of two poetry collections: Salt Memory (Main Street Rag, 2006), available at Amazon.com, and How to Live on Bread and Music (Perugia Press, 2009), available at Amazon.com. Visit the author at jenniferksweeney.com. This remarkable poet offers private instruction and poetry critiques. Learn more here.

PAINTING: “La page blanche” (“The white page”) by Rene Magritte (1967). Learn more at masterworksfineart.com.