Love Song by David P. Young

I guess your beauty doesn’t
bother you, you wear it easy
and walk across the driveway
so casual and right it makes
my heart weigh twenty pounds
as I back out and wave
thinking She’s my summer
peaches, corn, long moondawn dusks
watermelons chilling in a tub
of ice and water: mirrored there
the great midsummer sky
rolling with clouds and treetops
and down by the lake
the wild canaries
swinging on the horse mint
all morning long.

Poem: from The Planet on the Desk: Selected and New Poems, Wesleyan University Press, © 1991 by David Young

Painting: View from the Window, on the Olcha, 1915, by Marc Chagall

New England Winter by Erica Jong

Testing the soul's mettle,
the frost heaves
holes in the roads
to the heart,
the glass forest
raises up its branches
to praise all things
that catch the light
then melt.
The forest floor is white,
but here & there a boulder rises
with its glacial arrogance
& brooks that bubble
under the sheets of ice
remind us that the tundra of the soul
will soften
just a little
towards the spring.

© Erica Mann Jong

Image: Garden Under Snow, 1879 by Paul Gauguin

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009

Christina Olson - 1947

Click here for Wyeth's obituary in The New York Times.