I wrote a poem endorsing Henry James's view that "summer afternoon" was the sweetest phrase in the language and David Shapiro responded with this riff in October 2008.
10 / 25 / 08 Saturday
Summer Afternoon
For DCLehman just feeling happy James’s words you love
Today was unbear-
ably beautiful like a
bear walking thru school!
Today was amaz-
ingly cool and calm like fish
rushing to the knife!
today the sun hit
the bricks as if a painter\
added more yellow!
today supremely
lucid and blue like bluejays
imitating sky!
today was better
than many days but don't say
that just love today!
today today like
a kitsch garden on TV
or sudden color
at five forty in
the afternoon no one
was dead bullfighting
Today exactly
at 5:42 the myth
I live by shattered!
today close to 5
43 the pop of depth
and Rabbi Nachman
I heard the grass sing
Walt was not disappointing
the bear ate the kid
the palm leaf had moved
what is more a monument
smiled like pigeons
Scholem said Whitman
was his religion–did that
disappoint you now?
the rose in Scholem's
yard we plucked it was so big
it wagged its stem soul
I can't use that word
beautiful and not normal
making green ones red
Throw a diamond
on the rusty steel table
just three randomly
That was my today
yell yellow yellow yellow
stain of a blue day!
sing yellow yellow
yellow shall be my garden
Desdemona day
Kawabata saw
the beautiful in glasses
on Hawaiian glass
He loved the repeats
Oh dim moon oh dim dim dim
no he said Bright Moon!
Beautiful poem
As ugly as beautiful
as pornography
All is horrible
said my friend all wonderful
circumcised cirque size
Like an artifice
like an artificial lake
oh bright bright bright day!
seeing through difference
he called it but I might say
loving difference!
oh penumbra oh
and Van Gogh thinking he had
painted stars too large!
well maybe he had
when I take my glasses off
tear-shaped breasts appear
Futurists, beware
my eyes are stained with stars you
might find archaic!
as a sculptor said
nice to practice archaic
crafts! not that he did!
beautiful spacious
the end of sullen empire(s)
one day beats them all!
beautiful summer
on a bed all afternoon
don’t say beautiful
summer in autumn
beautiful as bugs to friends
sunlight on your hands
— David Shapiro
from the archive; first posted March 3, 2018.