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THE NAKED AND THE NUDE
Poem of the Week Feature
Two poems: Graves and Carver
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THE NAKED AND THE NUDE
For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art.
Lovers without reproach will gaze
On bodies naked and ablaze;
The Hippocratic eye will see
In nakedness anatomy;
And naked shines the goddess when
She mounts her lion among men.
The nude are bold, the nude are sly
To hold each treasonable eye.
While draping by a showmans’s trick
Their dishabille in rhetoric,
They grin a mock-religious grin
Of scorn at those of naked skin.
The naked, therefore, who compete
Against the nude may know defeat;
Yet when they both together tread
The briary pastures of the dead,
By Gorgons with long whips pursued,
How naked go the sometimes nude!
Robert Graves
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Bonnard’s Nudes
His wife. Forty years he painted her.
Again and again. The nude in the last painting
the same young nude as the first. His wife
As he remembered her young. As she was young.
His wife in her bath. At her dressing table
in front of the mirror. Undressed.
His wife with her hands under her breasts
looking out on the garden.
The sun bestowing warmth and color.
Every living thing in bloom there.
She young and tremulous and most desirable.
When she died, he painted a while longer.
A few landscapes. Then he died.
And was put down next to her.
His young wife.
Raymond Carver
Posted at November 18, 2005 12:04 AM