Altar # 6: Forgotten Treasures - from the "Voices and Visions" Fort Mason Printmakers portfolio

Xavier Viramontes

From the portfolio of 22 etchings by 22 artists, titled "Voice and Visions: A Book of Poems and Etchings." Printed by the Fort Mason Printmakers in San Francisco under the direction of Eleanor Rappe, each work was inspired by a poem of the artist's choice, corresponding to their assigned category: Part I, Of Love and Loss; Part II, Upon the Earth; Part III, Under the Heavens; Part IV, Journeys of the Mind; and Part V, Metamorphoses.

This print is from the fourth category: Journeys of the Mind. Its corresponding poem was "Up There" by W.H. Auden:

Men would never have come to need an attic. / Keen collections of glass or Roman coins build / Special cabinets for them, dote on, index / Each new specimen: only women cling to / Items out of their past they have no use for, / Can't name now what they couldn't bear to part with. / Up there, under the eaves, in bulging boxes, / Hats, veils, ribbons, galoshes, programs, letters / Wait unworshiped (a starving spider spins for / The occasional fly): no clock recalls it / Once an hour to the household it's a part of, / No saint's day is devoted to its function. / All it knows of a changing world it has to / Guess from children, who conjure in its penum, / Now an eyrie for two excited sisters, / Where, when mother is bad, her rage can't reach them, / Now a schooner on which a lonely only / Boy sails north or approaches coral islands.