“I love a martini, two at the most. Three – I’m under the table.
four, I’m under the host.”
— Dorothy Parker (The Algonquin Hotel, 1929)

Shakespeare is dutifully remembered
for his plaintive sonnets and perfect plays.
We are ruined by his genius, forever
at a loss to be adequately pained.
Today, we are on the opposite side
of Elizabethan diction; we brood
in prosaic tones and truncated lines,
we cheer blandness and raise brandy balloons
to Sandburg, Hemingway, Williams, and Frost,
those cryptic purveyors of emptiness
who’ve dulled the edges of our lips and thoughts.
Should we remix their drinks, I would request
this recipe: a splash of Whitman’s Dick,
& a dash of Emily Dickinson’s Wit.

“Je voudrai mettre dans le tableau mon appréciation, mon amour que j’ai pour lui.”
— Vincent Van Gogh, to Theo (Arles, The Yellow House)

I want to paint a friend whose hair grows wild
like grain that leans toward thunder: days
half-spent the way a nightingale must blaze
with song because the night itself is riled
inside its chest. He will be golden-haired —
a harvest sheared and gathered from the bone,
and I shall press into the oils my own
dark gratitude, the love I never spared.
But love is color breaking discipline, burned
from yellow ochre into molten light —
to orange that cracks the ebbing noon in two,
to chrome and spinning citron forced to turn
like suns around his brow. I strike from sight
the petty room — and daub infinities of blue.