Amiyose III (1965) Kay Sekimachi

pendant

mesh medusa

bells of shadow

taper in vulva banner

black ink-sift and float

down into woman ghost-hair

adrift in empty room

fine gauze over thigh

memory drowning

in the shade moon phase

dark whip trail

the sign for

silence

Nacht I (1913) Albert Bloch

Below left the burghers in their tall hats

truncated cones like thimbles for thought

protecting brains from the bright stab

of wonderment are descending bowed

by owning into billowy cauls of jelly-fog

Steeples and gables point like shark teeth

embedded in the railway-viaduct skyline

None of the men looks at the fireworks

above making rose lion-dancer palaces

yellow tutus chrysanthemums of flame

nor at one leafless arterial tree bearing

the future's blood into the bursting sky

Untitled (1948) John Hultberg

black ideograms pagodas

trail arc light arc night

arcades of char dangling

a scatter of after-dusk

thunderhead silhouettes

and the bonelit streets of

Abaddon abandoned

amid serpent basalt

crisscross of cat's-eye crawl

and above all in the earth

ceiling starless one

white-blind imp grin

fingers reach up to pluck

Scab (1936) Maynard Dixon

One thick serge arm cocked

above the flat dock caps

two lean in tensing

the third braces him

knees in back and side

his head lolling, eyes

closed against his shame

broken marionette

in bruise blue shadow

Environment and Heredity (1921) Perham Nahl

Under the vortex of the future

its camera iris inhaling sky

like a black singularity moon

the crone mother dugs dangling

holds back the symbolic Man

the anguished silver-muscle doll

seated on a sweep cloud bench

over his volcano pit of longing

but gripping his thigh a shadowy

tomorrow-giant facing away

is braced to pull this lost ego

forward into planetary deep

Adam Cornford was born in England in 1950 and moved to California in 1969 after shifting his academic focus from biology to literature and art. There he attended the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he studied with (and was first published by) Kayak editor George Hitchcock; and San Francisco State University, where his mentor was the Greek surrealist Nanos Valaoritis. Among his books are three collections of poetry, Shooting Scripts (Black Stone Press, 1978); Animations (City Lights Books, 1988); and Decision Forest (Pantograph Press, 1997). A fourth collection, Eyewood, is currently seeking a publisher. With Emmy-award-winning composer-author D.S. Crafts he has written and performed poetic theater and satire for radio as well as for local theaters, clubs, and the streets, and has produced libretti for Crafts’ music, most recently the "Spider Woman" section for the oratorio From a Distant Mesa. A chapbook of documentary poems about Oakland during the crack epidemic, OTown 8595, has recently been accepted for e-publication by the historical and cultural website Deep Oakland. From 1987 to 2008 Cornford was on the faculty at New College of California in San Francisco , where he taught the history and composition of poetry, drama, and interdisciplinary performance. Among his courses was a graduate writing seminar in Science and Poetry, reflecting his lifelong interest in the sciences, especially evolutionary biology, physics, and cosmology. He is currently working as a consultant editor and writer while completing the critical monograph Every Thing That Lives: William Blake, Science, and the Poetic Imagination and writing the libretto for *Galapagos*, an opera about the life and work of Charles Darwin being composed by D.S. Crafts and funded by the Brabson Foundation. These poems are from a series composed in the presence of artworks in California museums.