Robin Becker

in memory of painter Donald Evans (1945-1977)

The Miniaturists

When she showed me the canceled stamps
     of Evans' imaginary
countries, their carved postmarks,

I thought how lovely to live in a nation
     he named Stein,
where, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary

of Tender Buttons, the Post Office
     issues
stamps with quotations from the text.

She lauded his studies of pears, his love
     of appearances,
his taxonomies of sea shells and palm trees

and took me, first, to fictitious Nadorp
     for the children's series,
stamps of paired objects, elusive meanings:

bow-tie & rabbit; sunrise & comma. Whatever
     he loved, he loved
to scale, and then scaled down: an archipelago

of Friends and Lovers (Amis et Amants),
     or the state
named for the artist Weisbecker, in whose loft

he painted the homely National Chair Works--
     four chairs
in praise of Lower East Side hospitality.

She embraced her own treasures: World War I
     memorabilia, vintage lesbian
pulp fiction, insects in amber, recordings of Caruso.

Preserved like the cat mummy in the British Museum,
     the complete handwritten draft
of her dissertation stood in its portable sanctuary.

She'd take it from the tabernacle, part the silk wrapper,
     and show me the inscrutable
cross-hatchings, pages smelling of lemonwood.

Over dinner, we enjoyed watercolors of Mangiare,
     for which he named cities
after Italian dishes, and created the region called Pasta,

composed of twenty-five provinces, commemorated
     on festive stamps
to philatelic standards, properly perforated.

When the affair ended, I walked, each day,
     to the tiny park
with the diminutive swing set and pumped

my enormous feet against the small square sky.

*I am indebted to Willy Eisenhart for his discussion in The World of Donald Evans.

---

Robin Becker is the author of five collections of poems including The Horse Fair (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000) and the chapbook Venetian Blue (Frick Art & Historical Center, Pittsburgh, 2002). Professor of English and Women's Studies at Penn State University, she serves as Poetry Editor of The Women's Review of Books. contents | next