Michael Fulop

Two poems from Michael Fulop’s The Long Blue Evenings of Summer

followed by a note on the author

The Family

One summer two cellos fell in love.
And the next summer the lady cello
gave birth to a baby.
It was not a baby cello, however.

It was a violin with a high squeaky cry.
They fed it and they wrapped it in warm clothing.
But it did not grow.
It played music, of course, but a squeaky music.

The cellos looked at each other in silence.
In recrimination.
And at night they slept
with their curved backs against each other.

 

Michael Fulop

 

A Painting by Seurat

I would be happy to live inside
a painting by Seurat.
Here in this life I am surrounded
mostly by air.
But there I would be surrounded by pure color.

A dot of black for each of my pupils of course.
A few dots of blue for my irises.
And look how my body is touched
by the blue of the lake in the background.
In this life the blue would be far away.
But here the blue touches my face, my arms.

And see that lady over there:
she tries to turn the dot
of her eye toward me but cannot.
Oh.
And I do feel a little bit wobbly
when the light passes through my body.

 

Michael Fulop

 

The Family first appeared in Prairie Schooner; A Painting by Seurat first appeared in The Antioch Review

Michael Fulop was born in New York City in 1959, and earned his BA from Princeton University, and his MD from Harvard Medical School. He works as a psychiatrist in Maryland. He and his wife have two daughters. His poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, The Hopkins Review, and Prairie Schooner, among other journals.