from Pearls Before Swine
Can’t You See
Text: from “BoomBapBoom” (1996), DJ Icey; Image: from The Portland Vase
Black Surfboard of the Divine
Image: from Albion Rose (circa 1796), William Blake
Fresh Beauty
Text: from “Bright Jewels of the Mine” (1934), Albert Ramsay; Image: Albert Ramsay prospecting in Australia
Like Grace to the Hopeless
Image: Portrait of Fredrich Hölderlin (1792), Franz Carl Hiemer
My Gentle Faith
Text: René Depestre, from “Ballad of a Little Lamp” (1967)
Pain Stilling Us
Text: Martin Heidegger
Smeared Laughter I
Image: Emily Dickinson
Smeared Laughter II
Robert Fernandez is the author of We Are Pharaoh and Pink Reef (both Canarium), and is co-translator of Azure (Wesleyan, fall 2015), poems of Stéphane Mallarmé. His poems have appeared in Poetry, A Public Space, Hambone, and elsewhere.