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.

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?