Two Diane Arbus Poems, by Alan Catlin

Woman Carrying a Child Central Park 1956

She could have been 
my mother

With her almost shoulder
length dark hair

Angular facial lines

Not quite beautiful
but close

Maybe a camel hair
overcoat she wore in
all kinds of weather

She could be the same 
woman who told me
it never got cold in
upstate, N.Y.

She should know

She went to college there

And I believed her
more fool, I  

Left for college and 
a brutal winter where
temperatures routinely had
wind chills well below zero

That winter I contracted
double viral pneumonia
under dressed as I was
for frigid weather

In the photograph,
I could have been the small
boy asleep in the woman’s
arms

That woman with the worried,
preoccupied, downward
looking gaze

The kind of look my mother
always had when she went
places in her mind
no one was meant to go  

She could have been 
my mother if my actual
mother wasn’t confined to 
a nuthouse in 1956

I could have been loved

I could have been that
child


Alan Catlin

Click here to view this photograph by Diane Arbus.

**

Eva Rubinstein’s Diane Arbus Seated Before the Collage Wall

Diane looks older than she is
or ever would be

A woman in leather pants
and a dark shirt

Only a couple of years removed
from being mistaken for the sister
of her oldest daughter

Before the hepatitis
she naively asked a friend about,

“Can you get hepatitis from anonymous
sex?”

Before the orgies she filmed and
took part in

The persistent money woes
Married lover troubles

The depression
that fueled her fear
of losing her looks

She appears as a person
who no longer cares what 
she eats, if she eats

Who thinks,
“What would be the point 
of eating?” 

Of anything

Sitting, as she is before
the collection of death, destruction, 
doom

Not long before she would
become, “Portrait of the artist
three days dead in her bathtub”

​Alan Catlin

Click here to view Rubinstein's photo. Scroll down to bottom left image of Diane Arbus.

Alan Catlin has been publishing for parts of five decades in little, minuscule, not so little, literary and university publications from the Wisconsin Review to Tray Full of Lab Rats, to Wordsworth’s Socks and The Literary Review among many others. His chapbook, Blue Velvet, won the Slipstream Chapbook Contest in 2017. He is the poetry and review editor of Misfitmagazine.net, an online poetry journal.