Keith Haring at work, above

Another Poem from recent reading at Outwrite Books

This poem was inspired by the photo I posted recently of the Artist Keith Haring, taken by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair years ago--

discovering keith

struck, i tore a picture of you

out of vanity fair

he one taken by a. l.

in a setting you painted

crouching there on an ottoman arms wide

naked but for paint

on your long body

looking at the lens directly

a simple gaze touched by slight irony

a gaze that said (said)

i am here now, this moment-fully here
look at me, i am here

and i thought, wow, this is beautiful

i knew just a bit about you

dead now, time gilding your life and work

you there looking like an exotic insect or native

from an impossibly remote tribal culture

i remember playful drawings

deceptively simple images

paintings that on closer inspection

teemed with complexities

graphic, exhuberent, alive

tumbling head over heels spilling across paper wood canvas

filled with happiness and life and sex and death

ubiquitous in the 80's

when i was willfully distracted

by the morose palettes and dark interior dramas

of symbolist painters

so i tore you out and put you up

on the bulletin board by the bed-the big one

where everything important or inspiring goes

my visual journal my cork-wood muse

and i looked at you for two months

i didn't read more about you

i didn't look at your art

i only regarded you

the body the face

how you became part of your painting in a.'s photograph

which (let's face it) was clever (a lot of that in the early 90's)

but a well-done cleverness i couldn't ignore

nothing hindering your enigma or daring or vibrancy

allowing you to reach through the past (as photos do)

to me now

more than a visual pun

on your own work

more than a naked man

and i choose the word naked over nude

i think that's what you were in the instance of the photo

when you say with a gaze, again

look, i am here

yes, there, an artist divorced from the nude

nudes are aloof, remote, descended from the classical

nudes manipulate and titillate

but nakedness, the very word i love

say it aloud or under breath and listen: nakedness

something real and human and warm

by turns frail and defiant and yes, so funny (grin)

i think you knew with slight humor in your timebomb body

that no amount of paint

or styling in a studio lights bright then dim then flash

could hide

what you wanted to say

what you lived everywhere you could

in the subways on buildings on t-shirts in your store

every bit of you of you out there

so beautiful-and

to bring me that word in an image so many years later

naked

--Timothy Wright 2009

Please respect the copyright of this work--do not reproduce without express permission.

For more about Keith haring and his work, visit the Keith Haring Foundation.