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| Anne Noggle Yolanda in her Silk Hat 1980 gelatin silver print Fralin Museum of Art, Charlottesville, Virginia |
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| Jean-Pierre Sudre La cheminée de ma mère, Merville 1980 gelatin silver print Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Robert Reed San Romano, Jefferson Red Devil 1980 acrylic on canvas Fralin Museum of Art, Charlottesville, Virginia |
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| Joan Semmel Purple Diagonal 1980 oil on canvas Dallas Museum of Art |
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| Will Barnet Circe II 1980 lithograph Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, West Virginia |
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| Horst Antes Mit gelber Tableta 1980 lithograph Dallas Museum of Art |
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| Manuel Neri Posturing Series #3 1980 bronze San Jose Museum of Art, California |
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| George McNeil Green Enchantress 1980 oil on canvas NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida |
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| Robert Mapplethorpe Larry D. 1980 gelatin silver print Art Institute of Chicago |
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| James Moore Still Life (2 Bottles) 1980 oil on canvas San Jose Museum of Art, California |
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| David Mecalco The Prostitute Maria Inezde gives thanks to the Dear Virgin for having Work 1980 paint on metal (ex-voto) Fowler Museum at UCLA |
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| Jacob Kainen Winter Night 1980 oil on canvas North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh |
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| Robert Motherwell Paris Suite I (Spring) 1980 lithograph North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh |
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| Frederick Linck Rolf Koot 1980 gelatin silver print Kunstmuseum, The Hague |
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| André Kertész Jardin des Tuileries, Paris 1980 gelatin silver print Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Alain Kirili Commandment V 1980 forged iron Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas |
First Things First
Woken, I lay in the arms of my own warmth and listened
To a storm enjoying its storminess in the winter dark
Till my ear, as it can when half-asleep or half-sober,
Set to work to unscramble that interjectory uproar,
Construing its airy vowels and watery consonants
Into a love-speech indicative of a Proper Name.
Scarcely the tongue I should have chosen, yet, as well
As harshness and clumsiness would allow, it spoke in your praise,
Kenning you a god-child of the Moon and the West Wind
With power to tame both real and imaginary monsters,
Likening your poise of being to an upland country,
Here green on purpose, there pure blue for luck.
Loud though it was, alone as it certainly found me,
It reconstructed a day of peculiar silence
When a sneeze could be heard a mile off, and had me walking
On a headland of lava beside you, the occasion as ageless
As the stare of any rose, your presence exactly
So once, so valuable, so there, so now.
This, moreover, at an hour when only too often
A smirking devil annoys me in beautiful English,
Predicting a world where every sacred location
Is a sand-buried site all Texans do,
Misinformed and thoroughly fleeced by their guides,
And gentle hearts are extinct like Hegelian Bishops.
Grateful, I slept till a morning that would not say
How much it believed of what I said the storm had said
But quietly drew my attention to what had been done
– So many cubic meters the more in my cistern
Against a leonine summer –, putting first things first:
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
– W.H. Auden (1956)