I have been reading a biography of the Norwegian sculptor Gustav Vigeland, by Ragna Stang. The anecdote about he had to boil a book cover for the glue it contained, and how he ate the results, stands out. This is what one calls a starving artist.
Above image by Arnold Bocklin: I first became aware of this great painting when I purchased a reproduction of it on a postcard, bought in New York.
A couple of old ones, prose poems I wrote shortly after (or maybe it was during -- can't recall) a week in Albion, Nebraska, in August 1994, while visiting friends. Ann Erickson of Guerneville, California published them in her now-defunct poetry magazine, tight, in 1997.
Albion 1
by Jonathan Falk
Crazy Horse falls or rolls into the prairie.
Broken angel wings freight cemetery.
Soybeans throttle the soil, coffins underneath the slope loaded with occidental bones of colored glass.
Corn stamens thunder, dipping pollen into the air.
Packed soil where they danced, owl hooking its wings into a pole distant beyond windbreaks, cicadas call in tree domes, pearl streaks thread wind and evening sky.
Albion 2
by Jonathan Falk
Planet beams beyond earth's edge, arisen above plains town.
Windmill blades sigh on distant ridge, wind pouring from flush of receding sun.
Cloud banks, wrinkled and piled, stained with falling glory, looming against the grey zenith.
Birds voice in Victorian trees, pour like motes to nightfall.
Lightning floods clouds far off in the gloam. A penultimate scrap suspended in the drawing blackness. The tables of mortality pepper the ridge.
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