Happy 100, Wayne!

 Wayne Thiebaud

To WAYNE THIEBAUD, ARTIST, ON HIS 

HUNDREDTH BIRTHDAY (Nov. 15, 2020)

—Tom Goff, Carmichael, CA

We learned to love the sweetest of extremes 


From your whipped frothy rows of Boston Creams. 


We learned to explore the dizziest of reaches 


(Take Lombard Street’s chicane of serpentines, 


Whose S-curves quill the skin like porcupines) 


When you turned what was giddy enough in hills 


To roller-coaster verticals, the thrills 


Not only like railed plunges through deep vales, 


But how the mechanical clank tugs us aloft, 


The stomach suspense, our bowels turning soft 

With dread that only masquerades as fun. 


We bonk against each cliff’s right-angled pun. 


Your landscape cover art dazes and regales 


On Sacramento’s poetry book, Late Peaches.
Happy birthday, Wayne Thiebaud!


(Posted online among the Crocker Art Museum’s
100th-birthday tributes to Thiebaud)

________________________

—Medusa, with thanks to Tom Goff and belated birthday wishes to Sacramento’s Wayne Thiebaud! For more about him and his birthday celebration, see www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/getting-taste-wayne-thiebaud-180976339 and www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/wayne-thiebaud-crocker-exhibition/2020/11/12/ce34aa7c-2398-11eb-a688-5298ad5d580a_story.html/.

 

 

 

—Cover Painting by Wayne Thiebaud, 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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