A Bequest of Wonder

Within the confines of a silken sheet, the observers attend upon the temple. Before it returns to ash and dust, they light a votive offering. It is   in a portrait the thumbnail of the painter’s right hand   the sparse arm-hairs of a samurai beset by ghosts   the frog at the woman’s feet,

Dante’s Barmaids

  Of nymphs, I write for money; On canvas, there they dance. “Champagne,” they laugh, in corsets corked with bubbles popping out.   — This poem was inspired by a detail from “Inferno,” a painting by contemporary Swedish artist Per-Inge Isheden. “Inferno” is a portrait of the nineteenth-century Swedish playwright, literary luminary and painter August Strindberg (1849 –