His enormous hands, with fingers long and white as skeletons of polar bear paws, work back from real earth and plants posed in the foreground toward the perspective of distance and illusion. Off the twilight corridors the windows open their unenterable dreams onto landscapes that seem to a city child's eye melodramas of color and contour - behind a stuffed cougar with one kit the long perspective falls away to badlands melting layers of ice-cream cake colors. These scenes perfect, unreal, and absolutely true as rooms bright behind footlights the wise child, knowing neither place, believes. At the end of his life he left two windows for the children, never seen but heard scampering in the halls like squirrels over drifted leaves in the park: beyond a fox's night eyes - his mouth a warbonnet of chicken feathers - the moon-lined pitch of the farmhouse gable where we all lie ignorant of the scenes dwelling outside our sleep in darkness; in a tall, narrow window down the hall, a sequoia, the base a dressmaker's dummy of real bark over wire, soars to the one dimension of his craft, the perspective of the whole tree - 500 years of growth rings into 6 feet - as violently foreshortened as a life. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...TO ATLANTA UNIVERSITY - ITS FOUNDERS AND TEACHERS by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON COLD HANDS WARM HEART by KAREN SWENSON TO TIRZAH, FR. SONGS OF EXPERIENCE by WILLIAM BLAKE THE TENTH MUSE: THE VANITY OF ALL WORLDLY THINGS by ANNE BRADSTREET INVOCATION [TO LOVE] by WILLIAM DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN |