Melencolia (Durer)

#93

An artwork is passage of time temporarily arrested.
Melancholy inevitably ensues, new effort wasted.
My world is not impossible, but imaginary,
A natural and a mechanistic menagerie:
The nodding babe and the slumbering hound,
The skull dreaming in the polyhedron,
The ladder to rainbow and splintered sun.
I must unbalance scales, ignore the bell,
And drain the hourglass sand out of its shell.
The nails and the knife both shorn of evil,
The age's golden sphere now leaden still,
My calipers measure a pointless spell.
Despondently, I await the next alchemy of duration.
I'll concentrate forever, then begin my final creation.

Note: In Durer's time, melancholy was associated with the imagination
and artistic creativity. Click on the image to see it in great detail.

Rue De Paris, Rainy Day (Gustave Caillebotte)

 #92

Walking the streets of Paris with my wife,
Feeling her heart through her hand on my arm
(It is April and we're here for a week),
We celebrate twenty five years, a life
Of mutual shelter beneath the storm,
Sharing a blue umbrella as we seek
Out the old soul behind the city's charms,
What we've found in each other countless times
When the sun has broken through and we shine.
She gasped when she saw the Eiffel Tower,
Her wonder more thrilling than its power,
While the Winged Victory's arms were not missed,
Because she sought to entwine hers with mine,
And in front of Rodin's The Kiss, we kissed.

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (Seurat)

#91

Look long enough and Seurat's pointillism
Seems letters and punctuation, not dots,
Becomes a narrative, a verbal prism,
Written in a language that can't be taught.
The hook of cane, umbrella, monkey's tail,
A stone with a white and orange bonnet,
The pinch of waists and a billowing sail,
All forestall the waning of the day.
Only a running girl, a blown trumpet,
A leaping pup, having anything to say.
The rest is stillness, and while the shadows
Avoid the giantess, elsewhere they grow.
Emotion is atoms frozen and bound,
Letters to paper, and can't make a sound.

The Flammarion engraving (artist unknown)

#90

The Milky Way is stone and silent fire,
Flying ice and dust, and expanding gas,
But what we find within the heliosphere
Suggests a whilom laboratory
Where the essential elements were cast
And the residues made preparatory
For the distillation that's planet Earth:
Europa's water, Io's sulfur,
Gases from Saturn and Jupiter,
Engineered for the terrestrial birth.
The traveler sees, beyond a starry veil,
Cosmic clockwork, eternal music.
Kneeling, he lifts a hand as if to hail
His Maker, the tinkering mechanic.

Jacob Wrestling With The Angel (Rembrandt)

#89

In my blindness after midnight I could not see
If the shade I wrestled was a man or woman.
I say shade but it was not without its own light,
Or shades of a color, like the edge of the sea
Is a million greens and the sand a million tans.
I wouldn't let go; you wouldn't call it a fight.
Our muscles were a conflict between oak and wind,
My hold was firm and unyielding, its holy grip
Gave but held; impatient, it wrenched my hip.
Was the pain meant to test the firmness of my mind?
As the sun rose, I said, "Bless me and I'll let go."
"I can," it said, "Now you know what you know."
I did not overcome God, as the angel said,
But myself. He knows me now. I am not afraid.

Road With Cypress And Star (Van Gogh)

#88

Why is everything about distance, not place?
A star isn't just light years away -- it is fire.
The moon we traveled to no longer had a face.
The Milky Way is largely tar, with a little briar.
Leave the universe be. Space is only backdrop,
Incommensurable, a dim futility,
A perfect but incomprehensible beauty.
Suspend exertion and let all wondering stop.
Don't even follow the road to the cypress tree.
Go straight through mown grass and harvested fields,
Until the cypress is the only thing you see,
Until its scent is the only light its leaves yield.
What is will then displace all distances
And take away from time all instances.

Four Riffs on "Three Musicians" (Picasso)

#87

A tune is the ultimate abstraction,
An emotion expressed as a fraction.
Some notes invariably repeated
Become a cold emotion reheated.

Not all musicians are made of music.
Some are talent, some mere facility.
The best I've known live a necessity,
Like physicists slave to mathematics.

Picasso's clowns can only make us dance,
Twist our senses into a whirling trance.

I've wept at the silence a conductor
Held at the end of the Ninth of Mahler,
As if to say, "Behold what's gone before --
Anguish, redemption, hope -- and don't despair."