Richard W. Halperin’s poetry is published by Salmon (five collections) and by Lapwing (twenty smaller collections). The two most recent Lapwings, June 2026, are Silk Threads and Some Walk with Sticks.
In July 2026 the Danish artist Else Pia Martinsen Erz placed the poem ‘Echoes of a River’ on her web site as a complement to her painting ‘Faith and Migratory Birds.’
Also in July the most recent Salmon All the Tattered Stars: Selected & New Poems, Introduction by Joseph Woods, was reviewed on the 96th episode of the podcast series Books for Breakfast.
Breathless 2
The great wheel turns.
The 1960 film Breathless.
Critics have begun to speak of it
as capturing ‘an epoch.’
‘Epoch’ sounds strange to me,
I was there for it. Everyone, everything
in the film is gone. Even the jeans
in it have become costumes.
Things come up on the horizon,
stay a while, and disappear.
Poetic things stay.
Jean Seberg in that film.
I like to think that sometimes
the great wheel notices, stops,
and makes its
révérence.
The Tiger Leaps
for John C. Brereton
Virginia Woolf repeatedly writes in
The Waves ‘The tiger leaps.’
She knew something about that.
So do I.
Most walls – all? – are made of paper.
Easy for a tiger to leap through.
Where is my wife? Where are
a lot of my friends? Where was I
during my crack-up?
The tiger leapt.
Why does anyone bother to write
anything in English after Samson Agonistes,
which has never been bettered?
Because the tiger leaps.
Sixty-three years ago I asked a friend
why he had sat through a very long film
55 Days at Peking.
‘For the shoulders of Ava Gardner,’
he said.
If we have four minutes – three? –
to live our lives – dogs and most fish
have fewer – I am glad to know he chose
to watch the shoulders of Ava Gardner.
No Point to Press
The 1948 British film The Red Shoes
formed me. A young woman,
and a girl in a fairy tale ballet.
Each dies because she cannot take off
the red shoes.
I do not think the film would have
been made the way it was
had there not been the war.
In 1948 J.D. Salinger, a war veteran,
published ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish.’
A hard read in brilliant Florida sunlight.
In 1948 my mother saw the musical
Brigadoon. Brigadoon is a Scottish
village which appears out of a mist
once every hundred years.
During tough times, she played
the recording over and over.
Brigadoon is parallel to
Lost Horizon’s Shangri-la.
Try to tell me it does not exist.
Franklin Roosevelt called his
Warm Springs Georgia retreat
his Shangri-la.
The Red Shoes formed me.
I do not want to press the point.
There is no point to press.
Golden Mask 2
Let’s see.
I saw, one day, years ago,
a large floating metallic golden mask
placed above the sunken
fountain basin of the Luxembourg
Gardens.
I could see it from across
the outdoor café where I sat.
I can still see it.
The mask is much taller than
the two semi-circular rows of
large marble statues of illustrious women
of France which have surrounded
the basin for over a hundred years.
I do not know of what metal
the mask is made.
If it has a base, I cannot see it.
It floats. It hovers.
It is entirely expressionless.
It appears to be gazing at
the statues, the basin, the café.
It appears to be gazing at
walking and sitting and talking
and listening and dying and growing –
at everything which is not
a golden mask.
Only it is a golden mask.
Even dreams are not a golden mask.
Echoes of a River 5
For Lene
I hear echoes of rivers. I may have
always heard them. Broad rivers,
narrow rivers, tributaries of rivers
led down to by stone steps going
right into the water for people to use
who punt in little boats.
Did I hear echoes of a river at birth?
I think I did. I think I still do.
Forget your troubles, Come on get happy –
Judy Garland, fedora tilted at a jaunty angle,
dancing all over a bright orange MGM soundstage –
We’re heading ’cross the river
Wash your sins away in the tide
It’s all so peaceful
On the other side.
I think Isaiah’s Suffering Servant is a river.
Not echoes. A river itself. He takes on
everyone’s suffering, including mine.
He is so repulsive no one can bear
to look at him. He never says a word.
He never says a murmuring word.
Today my friend Lene sent me
the reproduction of a work in pale blue,
black, grey and white by Else Pia
Martinsen Erz: geese, women and men
who are refugees.
All seen from the back, all trudging
through shallow waters – a river?
the promise of the sea? – toward a
gigantic bird, also seen from the back,
its wings outstretched upward toward
a hole torn in the sky.
Hole does not mean not there.
May I be ready for the river.
The Galway Review 