The City Worries (Delvaux)

#24

I am beyond caring while others still worry.
Is my hatred less than those whose fear
Is still fresh, untainted by time's fury?
That bastard destroys our city one tear,
One rape, one sigh, one gasp at a time.
How to act? Pursue a lover, or demur?
Plead forbearance? Preach the sublime
And inevitable end? Or pray for a cure.
The latest come with their breasts over bows,
Some devil's notion of the perfect dress.
(I'd be happy with a simple suit of clothes.)
I see their awful confusion and distress,
But the Black Bowlers are now in control.
Even that beauty there will lose her soul.

The Great Wave Off Kanagawa (Hokusai) and Sinbad The Sailor (Klee)

#23

There is nothing to fear in these cartoons.
A wave poised forever and never crashing.
Red ink dripping from a crooked harpoon.
Each a vision unreal, a pictorial fashion.
Then why so much improbable danger,
The depiction of moments of great crisis
In a style so unlike the camera's iris --
To make what we'll never know even stranger?
The artists have painted man against the elements
Or mythological beasts, both mere figments
Of extreme but fake, unnatural commotion,
Riots of color to create a chaos of emotion.
I have killed many such monsters of the deep,
And ridden up and over fatal crests asleep.

Nativity at Night (Geertgen Tot Sint Jans)

#22

The sound of time is the sound of light,
So the morning sun would seem to say;
But now, when it’s either soon or late,
Is silent—dark, when it's any shade of gray.
Infancy (now in its shroud of amnesia)
Saw a thing as it was there to hear
With ecstatic nerves of synaesthesia,
Or like a planet without an atmosphere,
Naked to the bombardment of the stars,
Spun through space. That memory, stored
In our synapses, fights a prolonged war
To glimpse what our mind has barred;
A light the color and the sound of time
We know is not a product of the mind.

Mountain Stream (Ansel Adams)

#21

The stream ran through high mountain pasture
From failing glacier to pool to pond to lake,
Between banks limned with moss and aster
Rooted in cascades of shattered igneous flake.
I straddled the water running slow over stones,
My boots precariously gripping boulders
The water’s rilling shaped into hipbones.
Further up hunched matching shoulders.
I found a head and rolled it in, midstream.
The shallow, muttering water, unperturbed,
Flowed around and on like a vanished dream.
Provoked, I left not a rock undisturbed
And rolled them in -- the addled stream burst
Banks and drowned the mountain pasture’s thirst.

Nessus and Deianeira (Böcklin)

#20

It knows a thing or two, the old painting.

Rather, it knows how to know a thing.
A myth, given enough verisimilitude,
Will make a nymph of a rustic nude.
Only a bared breast betrays the sex
Of a muscled, thick, and ugly torso
And face, a sensory form of Perspex,
Though no woman ever grimaced so.
While not quite conceivably generated,
They are more human, Nessus and Deianeira,
Than all the faces digitized and pixilated
On photographic paper’s white cornea.
The ground lens merely bent and dilated
Light, while here paint fixes the eye on idea.

Innervision (Matta and Brauner)

#19

Spontaneously or under provocation,
Their rude and unconditioned forms
Wish to understand the hidden
Lasciviousness of the higher order,
The internal effective object.
They know its humor and charge.
They condemn the stronger craving
Produced by waiting for silence
And find the escape from the sermon
In listening to she who has come
Uninvented and endlessly variable.
They know that expecting an answer
Is like asking a color to guarantee
There will be no inhibitor of visions.

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.