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Classic and Contemporary Poetry
JUNKED BOILER, by LYNNE MCMAHON Poet's Biography First Line: For weeks it was his depression detour, / this futuristic box on legs Last Line: Thing whole and finish it, and give it to me Subject(s): Paintings & Painters | |||
For weeks it was his depression detour, this futuristic box on legs, two smokestack pipe fittings fixed on top and glass cylinder gauge still kelvinating, still in place, a junked machine retrieved from some alleyway, saved to keep him saying grace, which he managed, just, with spray cans and brushes -- corroded iron into colored grids on which, each afternoon, he ruined into significance the previous day's despairs. "One day the sun, among other things, went down," he lettered carefully on the top, then stopped, painted out Celan as too grievous for his own decline, first sign that he was getting well. The hell of sickness, he told me then, is intense solipsism, the world shrunk to your nub of pain. But that was never plain to me; he always made me laugh. After each spasm, an absurdity. How can they play the World Cup, he'd say, Can't they see I'm in pain? Then back to the boiler again, to paint the pinwheels and chrysanthemum bursts of Orion's belt in the southern sky, or entomology's variously winged and segmented deities, revised or simplified or erased altogether, to tether him to the next day's work and the next, a Penelope to his own Odysseus. And when at last he did arrive back at himself, Zoloft-retrieved and capable, he was able to see the whole thing whole and finish it, and give it to me. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...1801: AMONG THE PAPERS OF THE ENVOY TO CONSTANTINOPLE by RICHARD HOWARD VENETIAN INTERIOR, 1889 by RICHARD HOWARD THERE IS A GOLD LIGHT IN CERTAIN OLD PAINTINGS by DONALD JUSTICE DUTCH INTERIORS by JANE KENYON INVITATION TO A PAINTER: 3 by WILLIAM ALLINGHAM THE CHINA PAINTERS by TED KOOSER ELEGY FOR SOL LEWITT by ANN LAUTERBACH ON THE SEPARATION OF ADAM AND EVE by TIMOTHY LIU SUNLIGHT, DARLING by LYNNE MCMAHON |
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