staring at paintings, hungry -- by John Biscello

Hemingway wrote

that he’d go to the Luxembourg, hungry,

and stare at the paintings

and this was a great way to see art.

The protagonist in Knut Hamsun’s

novel, Hunger,

empty-bellied and delirious,

bites hard into his finger, rending flesh,

to see, I imagine, how far he’d gone.

Kafka’s “Hunger Artist” desperately performing sideshow feats

of living, of being,

and Paul Auster in his flat in Paris

translating French symbolist poetry

with a stomach groaning soliloquies.

Saroyan, in his room in New York, freezing, hair absurdly standing on end,

trying to write a story, to be a writer.

These are some tales of hunger and low strong fires

that make for compelling drama

when you, yourself, juggling

the pits and seeds,

dream of paintings

far-removed from an ordinary appetite.