RICHARD W HALPERIN Richard W. Halperin holds Irish-U.S.dual nationality and lives in Paris. He is published by Salmon/Cliffs of Moher (four collections since 2010) and Lapwing/Belfast (sixteen shorter collections since 2014). In 2024 Salmon will bring out Selected and New Poems, drawing upon the twenty collections and including thirty new poems - Introduction by Joseph Woods - on the occasion of Mr Halperin’s eightieth birthday.
The Wooden Palette After a year, the oils of the pigments one has used on a good wooden palette have penetrated the palette so that one wipe of the cloth can make it clean. But the palette remembers. The oils are within, and some stains on top are permanent. Some of the writing I live with is that. Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. Yeats’s Purgatory. Macdara Woods’ letter to me about Sunset Boulevard. Pentimento has something to do with it. Oil and wood, which are my siblings – Saint Francis stopped too soon –
have something to do with it. The painting is there. But I am the palette.
© Richard W. Halperin 2023 November - December POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net
