An Artist's Model and Other Poems

by David J. Murray

Overview

In An Artist’s Model and Other Poems, preferring to portray his model—a woman with whom he has fallen in love—in words rather than in paint, author David J. Murray off ers an extended hymn of praise to her, expressing unresolved yearning throughout.

Following a prologue setting the scene, he presents her with four gifts, each consisting of a set of twelve poems. Th e fi rst set of poems describes what it’s like spending Christmas without her; the second set of poems compares her to the Greek goddess Athena; the third set of poems likens her to a ballerina; and the fourth set of poems, written in summer, compares her to the beauty of the season.

Between each set are entr’actes consisting of several poems that comment on the complexities of their situation. Th e collection ends with an epilogue that recalls the mood of the prologue.

Reflecting the conflict between Murray’s emotions and his sense of propriety with regard to his model, An Artist’s Model and Other Poems presents a cycle of poems that are unabashedly of the high-fl ung romantic genre.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781475950465
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	10/09/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	136
File size:	331 KB

Read an Excerpt

An Artist's Model and other poems

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By DAVID J. MURRAY

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 David J. Murray
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-5048-9

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Chapter One

TWELVE DAYS TO CHRISTMAS

    Your Gift

    To raise your Christmas present to a shrine
    Was the somewhat silly thought that came to mind
    When I saw the photo-stand for which you'd signed;
    I was tempted, in fact, to call your gift "divine";

    But, instead, I have plunged that mood into reverse,
    And encouraged by the sight of your stand on my table,
    Something homemade I've prepared, wherein you'll be able
    To read about twelve Christmas days in verse;

    To start: when the roseate base of the stand I see,
    And its gilded greenish gold of curve and fret,
    And its star at the top as firmly posed and set
    As the star at the top of any Christmas tree,

    I am stirred by the truth of what these represent:
    Humanity-made materials that yet seem heaven-sent.


    Shopping

    A Christmas wind of thirty miles an hour
    Hisses and howls across my patio,
    Tempting the skies to mass themselves for snow
    And gather up their high immaculate power;

    But no snow comes; dank and drear are the days;
    Shoes can be worn, because boots are not needed yet;
    And shops downtown are packed, and streetcars let
    Their passengers off to stream their separate ways

    To their Christmas shopping, unweighed by heavy coats;
    Stars for the tops of Christmas trees sell fast;
    And DVDs and books and works that last,
    Like Laurel and Hardy's movies or the notes

    Of carol-containing music books, sell steady,
    And Christmas, at least in spirit, is here already.


    Christmas Lights

    All over the photo-stand you gave to me,
    Glitter and sparkle are sprayed on surfaces
    As if their tinsel stood for Christmases
    As fine as any you have known to be;

    The houses here spectacularly grace
    The evenings with lights of every hue,
    Gaudying trees with green and red and blue,
    Yet grindstones are what I think of, sent from space,

    Borne by imagination that hastily brings
    Their carbon'd wheels to whet and scour away
    Brutalities nobody wants to win the day,
    Paring them down into nearly erasèd things;

    I think of a cull of tyranny and sin
    That leaves behind those virtues that should win.


    Darkening Days

    This day-start's morning is dusty and drear;
    A cloud of darkness climbs and displays,
    Over the lake, its warning that days
    Will grow darker as proof that a new Winter's here;

    And all these depressing incursions of Nature
    Serve to press down on my upspringing cheer
    At the thought a new Christmas is hovering near;
    But you are away, so the season has tincture

    Of greyness untrammeled that dims the lights
    That sparkle internally and outside;
    My Christmas tree is lit up beside
    A window revealing the season's delights;

    But this wall of darkening cloud that approaches
    Seems to want to crown Christmas with sundry reproaches.


    Opening Gates

    While operas surge and seethe and 'round me sing,
    And in my life have played a momentous part
    In determining what I think and write in art,
    None of them means a single major thing

    When I compare you to their melodies;
    Yours is an opera that breathes and lives within
    My frantic brain, from whence I now begin
    An Odyssey to a world of fantasies

    In which I imagine that you, as onward you go,
    Dally with my uppermost dreamable dreams
    And turn my mind on whenever your person deems
    It's okay to say yes, but off when you choose to say no;

    Opera, schmopera, even the gilded Gate
    Of Eternity opens when you predominate.


    Missing You

    A fog has cut my landscape off from me;
    I only see concrete painted crème and matte
    And railings painted blue left lain out flat;
    The owners are renovating my balcony;

    Beyond is nothing but fine grey mist and cloud;
    A slight and sudden, lightly spaced, uplifting
    Of fog reveals a roof below, till drifting
    Mists re-cover it with a makeshift shroud;

    This fog has a force I can mentally extend
    Across the lakes and prairies to where the land
    Fades out from fields of grain into sprawls of sand
    And rocks and seashores spell the final end

    Of where you went away to, when you bereft
    Us of you, leaving us only Christmas left.


    Self-Searching

    A sorry story is one that drives apart
    People who have no need of mutual fray,
    People who, to each other, at Christmas, say
    They want less war and far more peace and art;

    Emotions are stonewall bleachers for a game
    Wherein the quieter the tears, the stronger the strain,
    And sometimes one's hopes slip back and can't regain
    That optimist trust that one stays just the same

    No matter what impertinence in life
    Should strive to pull one from one's nesting place;
    One's left with a sense of retrograde disgrace;
    One's tempted to procure a mental knife

    To sever oneself from malfeasances abrupt
    And thereby prove that one is not corrupt.


    Unities

    A tiredness sometimes comes to break a spell
    In which I find myself tangled with wonderful you
    Yet feel driven, half-riven by sleep, to swear that I'll do
    Anything (almost) my faults to expunge and expel;

    But then might be gone the wondrous spell's illusion;
    Gone might be gold, replaced by a hard-hearted ghost
    Wailing of sanity's seasons, while what I had lost
    Might flaunt itself in front of my confusion;

    And also away-fled might be my attempt
    To mentor your mind, and memorial lessons share,
    At the same time as wondering if you're aware
    That unities bind us from which we are, neither, exempt;

    So, mellowing somewhat, I state, loud and clear,
    My hope that those unities last beyond Christmas next year.


    A White Christmas?

    The world seemed, from where I looked, dispirited;
    To the right, a cloud, not low and grey, but black
    Hung with its drizzly edges rain-whipped and slack
    Over the sliver of light that Day exhibited;

    But, to the left, a sheet of sunlit lake
    Seemed to depict, blatantly, the stark
    Survival of hope despite the oncoming dark
    Of clouds trailing thunder and storms in their wake;

    Within hours, unwanted perhaps, there could be snow;
    But children love the snow's meanderings
    And blinkered weavings, loops, and whisperings
    Between the trees that by the houses grow;

    Christmas is just that, a blast of light
    That thrusts a blade into the heart of Night.


    Poinsettias

    In a world whose worthy vastness splinters me,
    I'm careful not to seem dictator-like
    And cautious not to seem too predator-like
    And never to reveal naiveté;

    So I write how a world resides in every book
    And in music, where melodies ride on harmony
    And in paintings of Nature and all her progeny
    And in paintings akin to Nature, but different in look;

    And I see how Nature herself has put stars on display
    And minuscule insect-works, crawling and tiny and small
    And sunsets that signal that Christmas will come after Fall,
    With maybe poinsettias pointing out the way;

    But when I describe what you're doing or writing or saying,
    I know it's both Nature and Art I'm portraying.


    Christmas Eve

    Like ships near an island, specks of black on a sea,
    A distant sunset sky was heavy with blocks
    Of black on ochre, static like lonely rocks
    That surged, out of a yellow-lit ocean, for me;

    The day is elapsing; it's Christmas Eve; I hear
    Faintly, so faintly their voices seem too far away,
    The sounds of children who laugh and scream as they play
    In Grannie's apartment and welcome in the cheer

    That fills it when the children scamper free
    Between sofas too big, and brandish plastic swords,
    While the room resounds with a carol's Christmas chords
    That stream, not too loudly, from laptop or TV;

    The surge of that ocean in its dreadnought sky
    Had brought to light the need for light as time goes by.


    Here's a Carol

    Here's a carol, a Christmas tune
    That says Christmas Day will be here soon;
    When the night has gone with the stars to rest,
    The world will awaken to feeling she's blessed
    By the spirit of Christmas, who's coming home
    To India, China, Venice, and Rome.

    And here is a chorus, ringing and clear,
    That says that Christmas Day is here;
    While the moon still hung high in the Western sky,
    The East had awoken with welcoming sigh,
    And the spirit of Christmas had filtered down
    To Australia, Greenland, and London Town;

    So here is a toast to today's Christmas Day:
    Long live the holidays! Long may they stay!

Chapter Two

FIRST ENTR'ACTE

    The Happiness You Bring


    I gather up my breath to sing
    The happiness you always bring
    When I hear the doorbell zing
    To say you're here;

    I tone my breath down when you leave,
    Not wishing to hear that I aggrieve
    You when, solicitous, I give
    You a silent smile;

    But when you have left, I find relief
    In poeticizing my belief
    That you are the halest and the chief
    Anchoress of Now;

    But what you'll become in the years to be
    Is too hard to foretell and too far to foresee.


    Advice to Myself

    Sleep now, but when the morning wakes
    The sleepy streets, be ready to abscond
    With treasures you have barely dreamed about
    And, in your widower's mentalistic eye,
    Bury them in sands of hidden doubt.

    Sleep now; but when the daylight breaks
    Across the soporific clouds of night,
    Capture your thoughts, wrap and bedeck them with
    Overcast views of Nature's quandaries,
    And bury them deeper than any hidden myth.

    Sleep now, because, when sleep forsakes
    You as you turn and stifle, unawares,
    Those treasures you once held within your hand,
    They will emerge again and point beyond
    Tomorrow to a newfound Humanland.


    Altarpiece

    My eyes await, the better to bestow
    Ascriptions of your beauty and your glow

    Upon an altar, purely in my mind;
    My alphabet, audaciously designed,
    Has clear incisions made to amplify
    The force of what the letters signify;

    The letterings stand in literate repose;
    Months have caused many weathers to impose
    Fadings upon the Is and on the Ts
    Of what had been inscribed, in poetese,

    Upon my altar; and there I'll sacrifice
    Anything (almost) if I can thus entice
    Amelioration of your attitude
    To a rapport that's more than gratitude.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from An Artist's Model and other poems by DAVID J. MURRAY Copyright © 2012 by David J. Murray. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction....................1
An Artist's Model....................8
Misunderstandings....................9
Nature Revealed #1....................10
Anger #1....................11
The Winds of Spring #1....................12
When the Light Shines Bright....................13
When the Snow Has Stopped #1....................14
Enhancement....................15
Twelve Days to Christmas Your Gift....................18
Shopping....................19
Christmas Lights....................20
Darkening Days....................21
Opening Gates....................22
Missing You....................23
Self-Searching....................24
Unities....................25
A White Christmas?....................26
Poinsettias....................27
Christmas Eve....................28
Here's a Carol....................29
The Happiness You Bring....................32
Advice to Myself....................33
Altarpiece....................34
To Bow and to Yield....................35
Too Deep?....................36
Giving....................37
Heavy Weather....................38
Trying So Hard....................39
Animalian....................40
Midnight....................41
Connecting....................42
Logic....................43
Time-Lapse....................44
Folly....................45
Horoscope....................46
Morning's Day....................47
Apotheosis....................48
Thy Throne....................50
Athenian Parapets....................51
Greek Islands....................52
A Mental Athena....................53
Opening Vistas....................54
Profligate....................55
Self-Seeking....................56
Disunities....................57
Athena without Fear?....................58
Why and Wherefore?....................59
Earth and Athena....................60
Athena Waits....................61
An April Day....................64
Something or Nothing....................65
Deep Red....................66
The Winds of Spring #2....................67
March Prayer....................68
The Rain....................69
Claws....................70
Anger #2....................71
The Light Has Gone Now....................72
Punctuations....................73
Stories....................74
Nature Revealed #2....................75
Plain Speaking....................76
Me....................77
Your Balletic Self....................78
Your Dance....................80
Follow the Beat....................81
Utopias....................82
Swirling Past Me....................83
A Possible Endgame....................84
Watching You....................85
Self-Knowledge....................86
My Golden Dancer....................87
Your Destination?....................88
Accomplishments....................89
Someone....................90
Dreaming in Colour....................91
Story Time....................94
Unburdening....................95
What I See....................96
Thought Can Be a Rotten Thing....................97
A Silent Street....................98
Idealizing....................99
Thinking Again....................100
Sometimes the Night....................101
Nobody Now....................102
Transitioning....................103
Your Power....................106
The Green Flash....................107
Gusts and Bursts....................108
That Line of Cloud....................109
The Morning Sun....................110
Sprawl Space....................111
Self-Doubt....................112
A Sky-High Wind....................113
Five am....................114
Five Thirty am....................115
Six am....................116
Six Thirty am....................117
Entombment....................120
When the Snow Has Stopped #3....................121
When the Snow Falls Slow....................122
The Winds of Spring #3....................123
Anger #3....................124
Nature Revealed #3....................125
Understandings....................126