Here is an early poem with a highly unoriginal title.
It's called "Nude Descending a Staircase."
And I swiped this title of course from the painting
by the French cubist painter Marcel Duchamp.
If you happen to have the painting in memory,
you recall how Duchamp, to show the figure in motion,
shows her sort of flowing down and shuffling herself
like a couple of decks of cards.
The poem is not trying to describe the painting,
so much as it is trying to swipe Duchamp's subject.
I was encouraged in this by a remark of T. S. Eliot's.
Eliot said, "Bad poets imitate; good poets steal."
So thus, emboldened, I stole.
"Nude Descending a Staircase."
Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh, a gold of lemon, root, and rind.
She sifts in sunlight down the stair with nothing on.
Nor on her mind.
We spy, beneath the banister, a constant thresh
of thigh on thigh.
Her lips imprint the swinging air that parts to let her parts
go by.
One-woman waterfall, she wears her slow descent
like a long cape, and pausing on the final stair,
collects her motions into shape.
[APPLAUSE]