Score for Ellen Fullman

Score for Ellen Fullman

Score for Ellen Fullman

I Was a Teen-age Clothing Store Salesman: Notes for a Training Manual

Straighten stock when not waiting on customers. Never stand around with your hands in your pockets.

Promote cuff links; they have the largest profit margin.

Art is felt life.

On page 24 of the June 2012 Harper's magazine is a reproduction of "Twin Peaks," a photograph by Ralf Brueck recently exhibited in the so what gallery, Dusseldorf. Roughly opposite it on page 25 is the poem "Unholy Sonnet No. 1" by Billy Collins from the Winter 2012 of Raritan:

Death, one thing you can be proud of

is all the room you manage to take up
in this Concordance to the Poems of John Donne,
edited by Homer Carroll Combs and published in 1945.

Mighty and dreadful are your tall columns here,
(though soul and love put you in deep shade)
for you outnumber man and outscore even life itself,
and you are roughly tied with God and, strangely, eyes.

But no one likes the way you swell,
not even in these scholarly rows,
where from the complex fields of his poems
each word has returned to the alphabet with a sigh.

And lovelier than you are the ones that only once he tried:
syllable and porcelain, but also beach, cup, snail, lamp, and pie.

Jehovah Witnesses, Wenzen Germany, 2001