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| Paul Fourdrinier after Giovanni Battista Borra Design for Lintel and Sill 1757 engraving Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh |
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| Édouard Baldus Pavilion de Rohan, Nouveau Louvre, Paris ca. 1852-57 salted paper print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Anonymous Italian Artist Window of Pope Julius III del Monte, Palazzo Comunale, Bologna 19th century drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Anonymous French Photographer Une Bombe a pénétré par cette Fenêtre ca. 1914-18 glass stereograph Harvard Art Museums |
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| Ilse Bing Paris - Window with Crooked Shade 1933 gelatin silver print Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia |
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| Arthur Rothstein Window, Sharecropper's Cabin, Alabama 1937 gelatin silver print New York Public Library |
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| Harry Callahan Chicago 1949 gelatin silver print Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia |
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| David John Lee Window in Pena Palace, Sintra, Portugal 1963-64 35 mm slide British Museum |
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| Max Dupain Untitled 1970 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne |
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| Maurice Cockrill Two Windows, Two People 1972-73 acrylic on canvas Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool |
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| Ansel Adams Window, Northern New Mexico 1972 gelatin silver print Minneapolis Institute of Art |
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| David Hepher No. 22 1972 acrylic on canvas British Council Collection, London |
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| Eliot Porter Stonington, Maine 1974 dye transfer print Princeton University Art Museum |
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| Robert Mapplethorpe Apartment Windows 1977 gelatin silver print Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Roger Wittevrongel Wall of Wooden House with Two Windows 1981 watercolor on paper Centraal Museum, Utrecht |
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| Clark V. Fox Classic Windows, Washington I 1982 screenprint Princeton University Art Museum |
Thirty Years Later I Meet Your Seventeen Year Old Daughter the Poet
1.
Would I know her anywhere, this child
who never knew you except in photographs?
She has your high clear polished forehead, but
"No, my sister has his dimple, the cleft
in his chin ..."
Tight curly hair (like yours)
drawn back, and your face, thinned, refined,
to a girl's – you in a girl's body, you
(thick, muscular, tempestuous)
newly slight, polite; you in a neat
print skirt, loose black blouse!
Now a seventeen-year-old classicist –
"Latin's my favorite" – you translate
Catullus, write tidy sonnets, envy the sister
who remembers the dead father,
but (as you always did) adore your mother
and walk with your head thrown slightly back
as if the weight of thought were hard to bear.
I rock in my teacherly chair.
She's shy, constrained.
"I don't want to read my father's poems,
they're all in tatters in the closet,
they scare me."
I tell her
I'm kind of a long-lost aunt, tell her
about the photo of you as (you said) "the young Shelley" –
about your huntsman's bow, opera, baseball,
endless games of chess in the dorm parlor with you
boasting your prowess.
And she's embarrassed,
you're embarrassed, living in her blood,
to think you ever acted like that!
2.
When you were a man, a thirty-seven-year old,
long after our last fight, last kiss,
you OD'd on morphine
and disappeared into the blanks
that always framed your mind.
But she's sent two poems and a thank-you note,
and her handwriting – yours – hasn't changed.
"It meant a lot to me to talk about my dad,"
you scribbled with your new small fingers.
I want to believe this, want to believe
you're really starting out again!
Do me a favor:
forget
Catullus, Horace, love and hate
and think, instead, of the epic
cell, the place where the chromosomes
are made and made for a moment perfect.
Translate those lines from Virgil
some of us once liked to chant,
the ones about beginning, about those who first
left Troy to seek the Italian shore.
– Sandra M. Gilbert (ca. 1990)