Salvatore Buttaci

                     THE IRONING LADIES (LES REPASSEUSES)   Painting by Edgar Degas, 1884. Poem by Salvatore Buttaci, 1994. "I have had my fill, I tell you! This morning I could have slept at least till noon but Claude up early before the geese, raged in another of his foul-mouthed moods, not finding this or that, blaming me-- Can you imagine, Jeanne? blaming me for hiding it, I who ask only for sleep!   A lunatic, I tell you! Why did I marry him? That question confounds me more than Who and Where Is God This Morning? and What's a Working Woman to Hope For?   Still, you had to see him when he was young. Has it been twenty-six years already? How time escapes us! Claude was the envy of every man: he moved with grace, little children and puppy dogs followed him, waving their tails-- The puppy dogs, of course. The children called him the good names they did not feel to call their own fathers.   A handsome figure of a man! And not afraid as most men to demonstrate how much he loved life, how much he thought the world of me.   Why, once on the Rue de Margarite he kissed both my cheeks  on the brightest of afternoons! Oh, Claude was so daring!     Jeanne, what is it about time that transforms a soul into a stranger? It is as if Claude the young handsome lover and...

How did the man become trapped inside a jar? Don't let the megaphone fool you. He can scream all he wants, but he will remain trapped, splashing in the briny depths. Something horrid this way comes...   My pet you say? From the door where you stand, perhaps you thought, Old Mr. Svenson has an odd-looking fish or a reptile splashing in that jar.  Then as you slowly walk towards the table, your pretty eyebrows inch up towards your forehead, your eyes grow large, and I must restrain myself from laughing uproariously. It happens every time.  Reactions are so predictable, aren’t they? And isn’t it obvious that from a distance one sees what he or she wishes to see, but up close, as you step yourself nearer to the object of your vivid imagination, truth rears its head.  You see life for what it is.  And sometimes, like in this moment of your epiphany, you are not pleased with it. “What is it, Mr. Svenson?” I stand beside the tripled pickle jar in which a man floats in the briny depths. There it is!  A man floating in the briny depths. I have allowed the thought to neon in my head for all the world to read and marvel at my genius. “Mr. Svenson, what is that?” Read the pure delight written like a magic marker across my face, child. Do I need to speak?  Does the man’s captivity not say it all?   “A man,” I finally say and...

        You can't see it, but there's a silencer at the end of her pistol.  Does Your Gun Need a Silencer If You Plan to Kill a Mime?   who can hear in the forest who cares if the tree falls there   on the city concrete  the mime bobbing  like a stringless marionette acts out a wordless life    heart beating without sound hands and face dotted with huge painted eyes that roll back white    slow as death a slash of mouth  lip-synchs the unsaid but who can read the mime rail against the mugger’s gun    when fired could unload little hot steel pellets that tear flesh and bone but a gun poked against a mime mimics a magician's trick:   suddenly from the fired gun a fluttering flag unfolds a red BANG bold enough to bring the mime to his padded knees.                        # © 1994 Salvatore Buttaci     False Arrest    Underneath baggy old tatters the beggar's heart  lilts to the mandolin notes he strums.   In the process a policeman who can quote  ordinances such as vagrancy and disturbing the peace  as readily as the beggar  can strum Italian ballads seizes the mandolin.   "You're making a big mistake!" cries the beggar. "That mandolin is all I own. It's the only peace I know."                #  © 1990 Salvatore Buttaci     A Short Poem   ...

THE WOMAN IN GLOVES (LA FEMME AUX GANTS) by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1891)     What is going through the mind of the woman in gloves? What is she thinking about the man she loved, the man who abandoned her?     THE WOMAN IN GLOVES   I have not  blinked an eye since his train left Paris! Outside the compartment window this moment finds him, I'm sure, staring, too: the white stone farm houses and the rows of trees rushing backwards in pale-green blurs as if pulled back by time's cruel hand or by the hand of a sulking child who takes his toys away and goes home.   The simile does him justice. Still another simile comes to mind: Jacques the spoiled child; Jacques the unforgettable melody nagging at my memory.   But then it pains me to admit among the playthings he's taken with him are velvet-soft pieces of my heart, summer sighs, my promises, the gifts I gave him on love afternoons, all those dreams.   In the garden now it is raining as though what is left of me cries out like a poetess imploring the elements to mourn with her.   Or perhaps the pelting rain is not a weeping but a beating down, a thrashing of  another child--the one deep inside me who slashes back  with darkest crayons all that only a day ago was a work of heart, now an amulet devoid of powers. She cuts away at life beyond this garden, slashes...

THE BALCONY (LE BALCON) BY EDOUARD MANET (1869) Whenever I look at a famous painting, I often wonder what the model was thinking about as he or she tried hard to maintain the pose given by the painter. Pressing concerns? Daily problems? Love gone sour? New-found love? And in a still life who owns the dish of fruit, the bouquet of flowers, the wine bottle? What we see in a painting is the stillness of stopped time, a scene captured on canvas. Light and shade remain forever what they were in those moments when the painter decided them for his or her subject. Like the eye of a camera the painter makes the changing changeless. He saves it.  The following poem in my French-paintings collection shares its title with the famous French painting The Balcony (Le Balcon) by Edouard Manet (1869).   Before I wrote each poem, I allowed myself some time to study the painting, to get a feel for whatever humanity I felt was connected with it. I chose the narrative poem to tell the story of each work of art. I wanted each painting to come alive for me. I wanted each poem to express that life, to recapture those moments lost in time when the painting was originally done.  For me these narrative poems place some of my favorite paintings in some sort of context, and in  that way make them come alive for me.  The old adage not withstanding that a picture is worth a thousand...