Timothy Brownlow

SELECTED POEMS

POETS ON MOUNT PARNASSUS
Raphael 

At that age I thought poets were strange dudes
With a band of laurel round their foreheads.
Not just males either, even Raphael
Places Sappho beside Virgil, across
From gaunt Dante, an earnestly reciting
Homer, with a young scribe catching every
Living syllable to condemn to paper. 

Pope Julius had these frescoes painted
In the Vatican. What has happened since
To put poets on the danger lists, along
With a myriad fierce, beautiful things—
Elephants, tigers, giraffes, the Nine Muses--
Let alone Nature herself, abducted,
Raped in dark basements of modernity?

THE MUSIC LESSON
Jan Vermeer 

No wonder Marcel Proust left his death-bed
To look longingly at your Vue de Delft;
The viewer can gaze and gaze and gaze
And still go back for more intangibles.
So soothing is the very use of paint
Seeing is believing. You taught us
How to see and how to believe our eyes,
As well as adjusting our ayes and I’s
To a frequency unknown until then. 

They think you used a camera obscura
To get everything just so—I don’t care
How you did it; instrumental or not,
You brought home the goods, as Leonard Woolf once
Said about Virginia’s perfect pitch.