Verse Wisconsin 113-114 | Ronnie Hess, Alice D'Alessio, Jackie Langetieg, Sandy Stark, Kathy Miner, Mary C. Rowin

We Pine For We Know Not What*
On Seeing George Ault’s Hudson Street

George C. Ault, Hudson Street, 1932. Oil on linen, 24 3/16 x 20 inches. Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Purchase 33.40. Photography by Jerry L. Thompson.

City of swamps, city of sails, where is
the sheer music of the river lapping?
What life is in this picture? No daisy
in the crack of sidewalk, no breeze blowing
paper in the street. No breeze. A car waits
at the curb, windows dark, one tire flat.
Time stops. Clouds hang.
No one sits on the stools in the diner.
Are there any people anywhere?
Are they all in Yankee Stadium for the World Series?
How bright and blue that background sky.
How strangely cast the shadowed light.
How small and white the little hacienda,
out of place and out of luck.
Precision has its price.
Dreams are stories told at night,
illusions painted inside a box.
Whose heart wouldn’t break on learning
the Great Wall isn’t visible from the moon?

Alice D’Alessio, Ronnie Hess, Jackie Langetieg, Kathy Miner, Mary C. Rowin, and Sandy Stark

* From an art review of The Whitney Museum of Arts’s exhibition,
Real/Surreal, by Ken Johnson, The New York Times, 2011

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Alice D’Alessio is a lover of woods and words. She is the author of four books of poetry and a biography, and currently working on a book of essays.

Ronnie Hess is the author of a chapbook, Whole Cloth: A Poem Cycle, and a culinary travel guide, Eat Smart in France. A second chapbook, A Woman in Vegetable, is forthcoming from Kattywompus Press.

Jackie Langetieg’s chapbook, White Shoulders, was published in 2000. She received the 1999 Excellence in Poetry award from the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters, and was co-editor of the 2004 Wisconsin Poets Calendar. She has published three other books.

Kathy Miner has her fingers in many pies. This means that her life is rich, delicious, and often messy. She publishes a monthly naturalist’s column for the Friends of the UW Arboretum.

Mary C. Rowin won third prize in the 2013 Science Fiction Poetry Association contest, dwarf poem category. Her work also appears in Echolocations, Poets Map Madison.

Sandy Stark has happily participated in several of these poetry events at MMoCA, and previously at the Madison Art Center. Her poems have found their way into Texas and Wisconsin poetry calendars and journals; her first book, Counting on Birds, was published in 2010.