January 2020
Michele Stepto
michele.stepto@yale.edu
michele.stepto@yale.edu
Bio Note:
I have taught literature and writing at Yale University for many years. In the summers, I teach at the Bread Loaf School of
English in Vermont. My poems and stories have appeared in various online publications, including Verse-Virtual,
What Rough Beast, and The Ekphrastic Review. Both history and current events furnish me inspiration and subject matter
Author's Note: These two poems were written recently, within the last two months, and came about from, as the one poem puts it, thinking about paintings. And reading about them too. I am very interested in how the two arts, poetic and pictorial, verbal and graphic, differ in their methods and in what they manage to suggest.
Author's Note: These two poems were written recently, within the last two months, and came about from, as the one poem puts it, thinking about paintings. And reading about them too. I am very interested in how the two arts, poetic and pictorial, verbal and graphic, differ in their methods and in what they manage to suggest.
On a Painting Once Thought to be a Portrait of Sappho
She is not a writer, the men at the Naples
Museum would have you know, only
a mere accountant, a pretty girl
caught doing one of the countless
inconsequential jobs a woman can fill
and remembered as such in her casket
painting, don't go thinking there was a brain
behind those shapely lips she taps
her stylus thoughtfully against.
Thinking about Paintings
Time doesn't pass in a painting any more than
it passes in the closet when the door is open
and I sit looking at the blue handled mop
making its wooden statement, the corners
of the washer and dryer shouldering into the frame,
yet composed, silent and still as an obit,
while outside the red mare dashes to oblivion
and I cry out, Stop! Wait for me!
And now she waits noisily at the door
while you put on your boots, your sweater and scarf,
your muff, your big jacket with the many
pockets you will fill as time's talons lengthen
and the magic required for travel, the stuff
you didn't think you could find, materializes.
©2020 Michele Stepto
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