The Descent From The Cross (Beckmann)

#18

The man being dead is beyond all doubt.
The painter has allowed us no illusions.
The body, tree trunk stiff, with a green cast,
Desiccated, a garden of endless drought,
Will elicit not one prayerful effusion
Of beseeching. All hope has been blasted.
The workers, shocked and careless,
As they are always made by this task,
Quickly hand down the odious carcass,
Their faces dim mirrors of his hard mask.
The woman in red cannot bear to look on,
But the man's mother looks us in the eye,
Challenging us to see beyond the icon
Of death, to see it as she sees it, a lie.

The Old Guitarist

#17

A man is made out of love, or out of music,
If he is made of anything worth being.
But that means that he must be sick
With sadness when love is only a song.
She left me for another and then she died.
Her lover beat me about the head when I cried.
I was defenseless but for this old guitar,
In what had always been a one-sided war.
I wrote a song to forgive her, her treason,
But it has robbed me of my soul, my reason.
You are the face behind my heart, my beloved,
And once were the frets beneath my fingers.
But now they fumble, as if they are gloved.
There is only this of you and me that lingers.


Note: This painting, at the Chicago Art Institute, is a famous example of pentimento. Picasso painted a beautiful woman, and then painted the image of the old guitarist over her. The effect, not apparent in this image, of the woman's vaguely visible outline, suggests the guitarist is singing about her, remembering her.

The Persistence Of Memory (Dali)

#16

The sleep button on the radio aborts

A sentence I complete in my hypnogogic
Muzz: a murdered innocence supports
The new hour’s inexplicable logic.
Blasé nature, having its fill of trees,
Pulls them all up to plant tall,
Thin rocks, become by implausible decrees
A maze’s broken impenetrable wall.
Fleeing memory (as though my years
Exhaust some primal force of variation
As I fitfully doze), they disappear,
Every citizen, from my interior nation.
The voice returns. I rise. Without fear or
Haste, I forget to dress before a mirror.

The Birth Of Venus (Botticelli), Sonnet #15

She attempts what modesty she possesses,
Only hands and improbably long tresses.
There's no wonder that she has been created,
But an urgency to bring her shell to shore,
To cover up her still shocking nakedness.
Sweet Aura seems dazed and elated,
Zephyr and Hora labor grimly to restore
Blindness to our vision of her loveliness.
She is, in her distracted state, already a woman,
Though she's not utterly unmindful of us.
She understands that we are only human:
We have no choice and will worship Venus.
But, it is unclear. Are we to honor her divinity,
Or, as men, become the prey of her virginity?

Still Life With Compotier (Cezanne)

#14

If in fact the apple shadows
The peach on the blue tablecloth
To make it seem riper, does
The empty goblet bend both
Starched napkin white and darkness
From a draped corner of the room
To evoke residue in a chalice
Or lateness in an afternoon?
The apples, green in the silver
Tray, are bronzed, like a bronze pear.
The answer to light is color
And fruit illuminate the air—
But only here inside that frame,
Where apple replaces its name.

Melancholy And Mystery Of A Street (de Chirico)

#13

The young girl rolls her barrel stave,
Hair a banner in stiff wind.
Without even looking at her wand,
She teaches her world to behave.
Not all shadows are slanted the same.
Due to the sunlight or the dusk?
There is nothing sadder than old lust,
More terrible than a child shamed.
The stranger waits, a fist clenched.
All perspective has been wrenched.
He hasn't even seen her yet.
Not time, but light has been suspended.
They are only shadows that will never meet.
Nothing goes on, nothing has ended.

The Village Of The Mermaids (Paul Delvaux)

#12

It is the waiting and not the wanting,
The transit of the day into shadows,
And the perpetual whispered taunting
Of the waves, in their straight, mad rows,
That is so hard for us to bear.
What none of us can know for sure
Has petrified us -- our fingers, faces,
And what is hidden by our dresses.
The architect of our village is gone,
Our seamstress too. Who will call us
To the beach, and call the others home?
The one man here is quite useless.
He wanders the street, chucking our chins,
As if we had more to offer him than fins.