'Does anyone still want to go with me into a panorama? '
—Max Brod
The sun floats down river
Resting from a long day.
As Banvard draws love
Birds in the sand.
She tries to explain
How his deformity angers her.
Unable, she leaves him
On the other side of the shore.
Banvard becomes
a traveling salesman,
s campfire fiddler,
s drunk, a painter of shores.
Yearning for her—
He turns her into the Mississippi shore.
Riding the long river, floating
On a brush, he paints her portrait.
Huge bolts of love
The canvas sags from longing
Immense wood contraption
(Gears-pulleys crank machinery)
Three miles of canvas.
An uninterrupted portrait.
The papers publish the spectacle
'The hunchback painter and his panorama! '
He builds a wooden stage
Winds up river then down.
The lines are long, (.50 cents.)
They wait for hours...
He sits in the middle
Of hungry brush stroke
Up river
Down.
Up river
down
Eyes straining—
To find her.
Nominated for a Pushcart Award 2008 Juked.com
Nominated for a Pushcart Award 2008 Juked.com The idea of the poem came from a book I was reading at the time wth the same title. It was a book of how history will always remember the Edisons, Einsteins and Darwins. But what about the others with similarly revolutionary ideas, but who plummeted into oblivion?
