NEW POEM BY TODD SWIFT - TITLE POEM OF MY FORTHCOMING PAMPHLET?

I am thrilled to have a pamphlet coming out in the first half of 2014 with Alec Newman's wonderful press, KFS. This new poem may be the title poem...

Unfinished Study of a French Girl

Barely there, if at all,

the one that got away,

semi-French,

against the wall,

it’s only air where art

could have been; the stroke

of seconds that slip between

what is night, and what

might be a dream.

Maybe she was a student

who never had to pose again;

a doctor’s patient never seen.

Half invisible, half known,

barely mysterious, just

browning greys, greens.

A face that happens

to remain, almost a boy –

because to form is to decide

only the name

makes her a girl, and even then,

she looks past that decision.

She looks:

she has a bare face. It is a body

that’s undone. Whatever

didn’t happen happened

for a reason, or none;

imagination’s lost address,

a day the umbrella stayed at home

and wasn’t needed

when it failed to rain;

the time the prayer was unsaid

at the graveside

of the passerby in the lane

quick and never dead.

She isn’t quite alive,

but that’s the same with most paint.

Her being fractional

makes her heart beat fainter;

at least it’s possible to hear

her breath out-gathering

like a song one ought to know

but can’t quite place

on the mirror she kept in

her purse on the day

she almost came

to Whistler’s studio.

----

Comments

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