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| Painting | Poem |
| Nude Descending a Staircase Marcel Duchamp (1912)  | "Nude Descending a Staircase" X. J. Kennedy (1961) Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh, A gold of lemon, root and rind, She sifts in sunlight down the stairs With nothing on. Nor on her mind. We spy beneath the banister A constant thresh of thigh on thigh-- Her lips imprint the swinging air That parts to let her parts go by. One-woman waterfall, she wears Her slow descent like a long cape And pausing, on the final stair Collects her motions into shape. |
| Painting | Poem |
| The Village of the Mermaids Paul Delvaux (1942)  | "Paul Delvaux: The Village of the Mermaids" Lisel Mueller (1988) Who is that man in black, walking away from us into the distance? The painter, they say, took a long time finding his vision of the world. The mermaids, if that is what they are under their full-length skirts, sit facing each other all down the street, more of an alley, in front of their gray row houses. They all look the same, like a fair-haired order of nuns, or like prostitutes with chaste, identical faces. How calm they are, with their vacant eyes, their hands in laps that betray nothing. Only one has scales on her dusky dress. It is 1942; it is Europe, and nothing fits. The one familiar figure is the man in black approaching the sea, and he is small and walking away from us. |
| Painting | Poem |
| Girl Powdering Her Neck Kitagawa Utamaro (c. 1790)  | "Girl Powdering Her Neck" Cathy Song (1983) The light is the inside sheen of an oyster shell, sponged with talc and vapor, moisture from a bath. A pair of slippers are placed outside the rice-paper doors. She kneels at a low table in the room, her legs folded beneath her as she sits on a buckwheat pillow. Her hair is black with hints of red, the color of seaweed spread over rocks. Morning begins the ritual wheel of the body, the application of translucent skins. She practices pleasure: the pressure of three fingertips applying powder. Fingerprints of pollen some other hand will trace. The peach-dyed kimono patterned with maple leaves drifting across the silk, falls from right to left in a diagonal, revealing the nape of her neck and the curve of a shoulder like the slope of a hill set deep in snow in a country of huge white solemn birds. Her face appears in the mirror, a reflection in a winter pond, rising to meet itself. She dips a corner of her sleeve like a brush into water to wipe the mirror; she is about to paint herself. The eyes narrow in a moment of self-scrutiny. The mouth parts as if desiring to disturb the placid plum face; break the symmetry of silence. But the berry-stained lips, stenciled into the mask of beauty, do not speak. Two chrysanthemums touch in the middle of the lake and drift apart. |
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