Altarpiece No. 1 (Hilma af Klint), Sonnet #579

 

Here is a painting of our mind,

A congeries of colored shapes.

Balls of twisted twine unwind.

What rises into reach escapes.

A thought is not of any kind

To the overly sighted blind.

Atop the altar of the brain,

A holiness we can’t sustain

Explodes and falls like acid rain,

Leaving neither symbol nor stain.

The pyramid and the circle

Rise from a baseless miracle,

The infant’s incoherent cries

At what enters unprepared eyes.

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My Human Disguise.

The Bathers (Picasso), Sonnet #294

The Bathers are seekers, not believers.
(Old Possum and Pound are as dry as rust,
While Frost and Stevens compromise with trust,
And Berryman is a soul deceiver.)
Though the Bathers are not sculpted from sand,
By some moist, cool Heisenbergian hand,
They're happiest on a floating island,
Where they can sit or swim or float or stand.
The Bathers build boats with uneven keels
They steer through sand in concentric circles;
It's easy to make progress when they kneel,
And the boats sometimes produce miracles.
At sandy palimpsests, they dare to peek,
Because (not often) they glimpse what they seek.

The Argument from Design

The religious impulse, it seems to me, is more about seeking than finding. There’s no greater composer devoted to this search than Gustav Mahler. The most memorable concert I ever attended was roughly 15 years ago. At that time, my mother was dying of cancer and Alzheimer’s. The Berlin Phiharmonic and Claudio Abbado were performing Mahler’s 9^th Symphony, a work full of searching, sadness, desperation, resolution, and redemption. At the end of the performance, Abbado did something I’ve never seen a conductor do before, nor since. After the last note, he kept his arms up, pausing everything, the room entirely quiet, for the longest time. He waited and waited, and waited. No one made a sound. Then it hit me. It was as though he was saying, “Consider what you have just heard, the sorrow, the wonder, and the searching in this music, and do not despair.” It was a terrifying and joyful moment, and when he finally put his arms down, followed by the loudest applause I’ve ever heard.

Not long after that, I wrote this poem about searching.

The Argument from Design

There is only one tree in the park.

Not this day only, but every day,

I find that tree when the day grows dark,

Never before dark, when the gray

Leaves are like a whispered amen

To a prayer I wasn’t there to say.

Therefore, I’m cautious and slow when

I start to climb (I believe the tree

Is not unknown to other men);

I test each limb before I leave the

One beneath, without assurance

Any but the lowest will receive me.

Then my doubt subsides where I chance

Upon a tangled branch, ripped free

The time I almost lost my balance.

Now I can move quickly up the tree,

Into its clotted heart, where the dark

Yields, to my callused fingers only,

The life of the one tree in the park.