If you dare to tell him he can’t
The monster starts his dancing rant.
The noise blasts an half-empty House
Where nothing stirs, not even a louse.
His legs lift just so high and pound
And pound the ground like myriad rounds
Aimed to shell the foundations
Of once allied loyal nations.
(He makes of enemies his friends
For obvious and evil ends.)
His confused shrieking grows louder,
Anger eloquent as gun powder.
When dance and rant become one
The work of dictatorship’s done.
My body's naked decay
illuminates a room of mirrors,
themselves reflections, years
compressed into a backward look.
That was flat bone, that, my eye,
that, hard skin, sharp spine.
As number shapes itself,
we all gradually freeze
into the markless prism
of each day: One. Attention!
Two. Prayer! Three. Reach out!
Thus, the count approximates me.
The caliper and the scale
exact a shade of difference
between mole and melanoma-
sensations bought and sold:
a faceless, Ernstian torso,
odalisque sans ottoman,
I beckon like blue oblivion.
Afloat in a dusty tearpool
with feathers, stone, and pigment
peeled from unsized canvas,
mine is the life of reclining truth,
with plump breasts pointing up.
There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all
beings like themselves...We find human faces in the moon and armies
in the clouds. David Hume
The anthropomorphic follows me around —
In carpets, tree bark, and abstract paintings.
“If I am the figure, what is the ground?”
Each face whispers, “or am I just feigning?”
Or am I the pretext for pretending,
I reason, a message I am sending
To cohere around the inchoate
Only I can look at and recognize?
These flickering (blinked) images sate
My comprehension, if not my eyes.
“My face will melt if you don’t look at me,”
These ghost images say repeatedly.
I too unseen uncertainly erase —
Though an unreal painting could take my place.
How can sound mean to me?
A note, chord or melody,
Or an invisible bird’s song,
Even the long ringing of a gong,
Is merely an evanescence
To the most fleeting of senses.
It’s only in memory that sound
As music turning round and round
Can deliciously endure
Until distilled and rendered pure.
Zen tiger — imaginary,
None living in Japan — just pelt
From which to construct a kitty —
No sharp claws and jaws, no fear felt.
It slips between stands of bamboo
On silently pillowed paws,
A denizen of our thought-zoo
Who will blink out science’s laws.
It rubs against ungiving grass
And under the shoots’ fingers purrs.
It hides as other animals pass,
Having no taste for flesh-filled furs.
Like time the tiger emerges
And as quickly all things purges.
The brushes kept slipping from his fingers.
Wind-tortured fields of wheat under darkened skies-
every brushstroke a nail.
The season's rustling hurry and the dusk
emotionless crows flap up to multiply
dun the wheat's gold and usurp the storm.
The blackened, infinite blue,
his palette's only suggestion of the primary;
red and yellow are plant and soil,
each decaying at the other's root.
And why the two moons? A starless night will come?
Is one a waning sun? When all else is clear:
grasses sprout darkly along the muddy path
that goes into the field to stop.
Or turns to go where the eye can't see.
Note: There’s some disagreement about whether this
or Tree Roots was Van Gogh’s last painting. In terms
of content, this, Wheat Field with Crows, is the more
convincing candidate.
