By ESTHER BELL
From September 9 to November 27, 2011, The Morgan Library & Museum presents seventeen exquisite drawings and some letters by French master Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. In this issue, The Common publishes four drawings from the exhibition.
Read an interview between editor Jennifer Acker and curator Esther Bell about these drawings and the artist’s refined sense of place here.
By DANIEL TOBIN
Translated loosely from a lost Akkadian tablet
discovered among the ruins of Kush.
God of the first waters, Ea, listen,
You who parsed chaos with a net from the day:
Unfasten your knots, let the swells replenish
From subtlest channels, from the seams of flesh.
The galaxies circuit in their bright delay.
The least wind tempts me with what might have been.
By ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTA
Wearing loose clothes, light cottons,
you sit and fan yourself with a newspaper
supplement, a glass of tepid
fennel-flavoured sherbet by your side.
By ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTA
Fortysomething, slight of build,
he lived next door with his parents
in an Art Deco house with garden to match
and tall trees that came up to my third floor flat
from where I could touch their leaves. Squirrels
ran up and down them all day, squeaking.
By DANIEL TOBIN
Despite having no lungs and unable to breathe, the second
head displays signs of independent consciousness….
The first fiction is
I’m talking to you at all,
the more amorphous
of my own Janus head, the god
alive and compassing
what has gone and what
is coming, though
which is which is
hard to say. Did I say
my own? I meant ours, my
sister twin, the comelier
By ILAN STAVANS and TERESA VILLEGAS
Un pájaro puso a su dueño en una jaula. “Nuestros papeles se han invertido”, dijo el pájaro. “¡Quiero que cantes!” El dueño se quejó: “Pero yo no sé cantar”. “No importa”, gritó el pájaro. El dueño silbó pero claramente no tenía ningún ritmo. “Prefiero que bailes ante mí”. El dueño bailó sin ninguna gracia. El pájaro se sintió desilusionado. “De cualquier manera te mantendré en la jaula”. Sin embargo, una hora más tarde el pájaro estaba del todo aburrido. “No me había dado cuenta que tener una mascota es como estar en la cárcel. En la medida que controlamos a los demás ellos también nos controlan a nosotros”.
By STEPHEN HAVEN
Each evening my half-coon hound dog buries her snout
In her foul dish then comes up singing, moans, complains
About her condition, until I hook her up, let her shit
And piss among the graves—who’s watching, anyway?—
The groundskeepers all home by then, their evening shows
Just flickering, the trees along the forested edge
Leaning as always toward distant centuries.
By DANIEL TOBIN
It could be on a card, tucked away somewhere buried
In a drawer under tools, the keys to doors
Left long behind, folded like a phone number
Into the black book of forgotten friends—the name
By HOLLIE HARDY
Come home from a Tupperware party.
Look out across the lake and imagine the feel of your tongue
against the truth.
Prevent the neighbor’s dog from barking.
Try to find the unselfconsciously erotic person hiding within.
By ELIZABETH HAZEN
Mountains rise beyond the Laundromat
like ochre waves about to crash; our father,
armed with tools and pack, tracks the rocks
without a map. Here, the Laundromat is all
in a strip of vacancies; for miles, nothing
but dirt, dust, outcrop, sky. Our mother gives
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