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93


His poems, like his pictures, drew from experience filtered through his memories and imagination. After he visited a 19th Century cemetery in the gold country, at Smartville, he wrote:

Now you lie
Neatly in death
In your own row
Forgotten and deep
In the dry heat
Of weather
And time
An epitaph
Of majestic memories
Known only
To the same moon
That passed
This way before.
When moonlight mattered
When lights flickered
When life stood up and death died alone
On its own hill
Without you

94


Some of his poetry can be read as a view of his thinking as a painter -- not so much what he saw as what he thought about what he saw, how he observed and processed what he saw -- both visually and imaginatively. Poetic images sometimes refer to and mingle with the images of his visual art.

San Blas

He stayed in San Blas, Mexico, and he wrote, “I heard a metallic distance,” recalling his discovery of San Blas and the bells that Longfellow decried. Reich was more romantic than Longfellow in his response to those bells, but Longfellow could have been describing Reich when he called himself
… a dreamer of dreams, To whom what is and what seems
Are often one and the same…

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