Tom Quirk
White beard and shaved head,
A Merton-monkish master
Whose watercolor class put me
Through the wringer with its
Twenty-painting requirement
For my slow painstaking work.
Impossible, and not just at first,
But he kept me at it, down-
Playing my complaints, offering
Maddening encouragements.
By mid-term I’d begun to set
My figures against ever starker
Backgrounds till they were
Backed by nothing except
The paper’s sheer white nap—
A blankness like the absence
Behind the empirical world
According to the Tao Te Ching,
Though the connection never
Occurred to me till later.
He noticed what I was doing,
Of course, stripping away
All those details. Still, it must
Have struck him as a credible
Enough solution, my floating
Figures upon an emptiness
From which they might just
Have emerged. Even then
I was frantically cutting mats
Right up to the last day of class.
Making the grade would be
His lasting present to me.
Pittsburgh Quarterly is now accepting submissions for its online poetry feature. PQ Poem is seeking poetry from local, national and international poets that highlight a strong voice and good use of imagery, among other criteria. To have your work featured, send up to three previously unpublished poems in Word or PDF format as well as a brief bio to pittsburghquarterlymag@gmail.com. Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but if work is accepted elsewhere, please alert us.
ROBERT GIBB’s books include “After,” which won the 2016 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and “Among Ruins,” which won Notre Dame’s Sandeen Prize in Poetry for 2017. Other awards include a National Poetry Series title (“The Origins of Evening”), two NEA Fellowships, a Best American Poetry and a Pushcart Prize. A new book, “Sightlines,” has won the Prize Americana for Poetry.
