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| James Brooks Untitled ca. 1946 graphite on paper Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh |
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| James Brooks Untitled 1950 gouache and ink on paper Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh |
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| James Brooks Number 44 1951 oil on canvas Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
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| James Brooks Untitled 1955 oil on canvas San Jose Museum of Art, California |
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| James Brooks Gant 1955 oil on canvas Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York |
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| James Brooks Karrig 1956 oil on canvas Walker Art Center, Minneapolis |
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| James Brooks Boon 1957 oil on canvas Tate Modern, London |
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| James Brooks Dolamen 1958 oil on canvas Guggenheim Museum, New York |
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| James Brooks Anduze 1960 oil on canvas Seattle Art Museum |
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| James Brooks Cooba 1963 oil on canvas Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York |
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| James Brooks Hanrahan 1966 acrylic on canvas Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
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| James Brooks Harmagh 1967 acrylic on canvas Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC |
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| James Brooks Untitled 1967 collage and ink on paper Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh |
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| James Brooks Swandor 1969 oil on canvas Milwaukee Art Museum |
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| James Brooks Concord 1975 screenprint Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York |
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| James Brooks Eastern 1982 lithograph San Diego Museum of Art |
Youth
My sister and I at two ends of the sofa,
reading (I suppose) English novels.
The television on; various schoolbooks open,
or places marked with sheets of lined paper.
Euclid, Pythagoras. As though we had looked into
the origin of thought and preferred novels.
Sad sounds of our growing up –
twilight of cellos. No trace
of a flute, a piccolo. And it seemed at the time
almost impossible to conceive of any of it
as evolving or malleable.
Sad sounds. Anecdotes
that were really still lives.
The pages of the novels turning;
the two dogs snoring quietly.
And from the kitchen,
sounds of our mother,
smell of rosemary, of lamb roasting.
A world in process
of shifting, of being made or dissolved,
and yet we didn't live that way;
all of us lived our lives
as the simultaneous ritualized enactment
of a great principle, something
felt but not understood.
And the remarks we made were like lines in a play,
spoken with conviction but not from choice.
A principle, a terrifying familial will
that implied opposition to change, to variation,
a refusal even to ask questions –
Now that world begins
to shift and eddy around us, only now
when it no longer exists.
It has become the present: unending and without form.