Images Imagined And Recalled Poem by gershon hepner

Images Imagined And Recalled



Images imagined and recalled
rain on the masterpoet’s mind like mist
that lubricates the lips that have enthralled
him in the past, but he has never kissed.

Inspired by Robert Lowell’s “Epilogue, ” cited by Thomas L. Jeffers in the October 2003 issue of Commentary: which begins:

Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme––
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled.
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
It trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

10/4/03,3/12/09

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