Portrait

(For s. A.)


TO write one book in five years
 or five books in one year,
 to be the painter and the thing painted,
... where are we, bo?

 Wait—get his number.
 The barber shop handling is here
 and the tweeds, the cheviot, the Scotch Mist,
 and the flame orange scarf.

 Yet there is more—he sleeps under bridges
 with lonely crazy men; he sits in country
 jails with bootleggers; he adopts the children
 of broken-down burlesque actresses; he has
 cried a heart of tears for Windy MacPherson’s
 father; he pencils wrists of lonely women.

 Can a man sit at a desk in a skyscraper in Chicago
 and be a harnessmaker in a corn town in Iowa
 and feel the tall grass coming up in June
 and the ache of the cottonwood trees
 singing with the prairie wind?

Published in Smoke and Steel

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Any corrections or public domain poems I should have here? Email me at poems (at) this domain.