Poem of the Day
Bob Ross Paints Your Portrait
By Terrance Hayes
Today we’re going to get to work on the details
Today we’re going to get to work on the details
how softly one is seduced by whispers.
Take notice, when leafing through, say, a Calvino novel,
of all of the pages gone blank
He will teach me how to seduce / Men, stags, double-winged angels
The shaven rinds of lemon
we squeeze and stir
into our espresso,
In the spring they ripen and swarm the trees,
the waxy little fruits that resemble bald heads.
I collect their remains: piebald, sweet
and sour. A syrup made of loquats
is said to cure cough. Their woolly twigs
splinter in pear blight.
Setting: crooked Brooklyn—rendered beautiful by a night
of rough, wind-driven snow needled across building faces,
sticking where stucco has worn away over years—fragments
of exposed brick—hard edges of a first, forgotten surface.
Father, all of the fears
I’ve learned are one word: silence.
How is emptiness measured? What can
Ghosts peel from the wallpaper. They turn to foxes,
run red to the trees. Weather knots
at the corners of sleep and will not recede.
By now, sir, you expect a second installment.
What novel is worth its ink if the hero's ship
never finishes sinking, if the cold tide
If I tell a story of America it will be with the needle
splitting Demuth's needle-pocked skin-how his blood blooms
in insulin as he hunches his shoulder to shield the syringe
Were I there, leaning against a London building's
filthy stonework, gazing by chance into a street
at the moment of this carriage's transit