Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

by Frank O'Hara

The Painter of the Night

Someone called in a report that she had

seen a man painting in the dark over by the

pond. A police car was dispatched to go in-

vestigate. The two officers with their big

flashlights walked all around the pond, but

found nothing suspicious. Hatcher was the

younger of the two, and he said to Johnson,

"What do you think he was painting?" Johnson

looked bemused and said, "The dark, stupid.

What else could he have been painting?" Hatcher,

a little hurt, said, "Frogs in the Dark, Lily-

pads in the Dark, Pond in the Dark. Just as

many things exist in the dark as they do in

the light." Johnson paused, exasperated. Then

Hatcher added, "I'd like to see them. Hell,

I might even buy one. Maybe there's more out

there than we know. We are the police, after-

all. We need to know."

by James Tate