The Magpie on the Gallows


 
 
Bruegel willed his last work to his wife.
We look down a slope of leafing trees
toward a weatherbeaten gallows, where
a small black-white magpie has alighted.
A group of cheerful peasants goof and
tumble waltzing down the hill, merge
with the background (sketchy, indistinct).
Beyond the rickety gray wooden frame
a May-time vista opens wide (vast, mild,
serene) to mountains, sunlit castles, sky.

 
Everything returns at last to the wife,
the bride, the mother in the landscape.
Mendelssohn – a dream my mother had
(her miniature oils were its expression,
the world I recognize is their reflection).
Out of summers buried deep, the longing
streams: the tripod of the firmament
rests on a point of irrational blind
balance: the magpie rumors – wars, 
scandals – skitter across an icy surface.

 
Bruegel’s image seems to say, the world
outlives our quarrels with our dying;
our quarrels and our dying flit away
enfolded in a subtler nature (one
we cannot fathom yet, but witness
here – peering into the limpid curve,
the tender distances, the calm horizon).
Remnants of an ancient controversy
teeter on the hillside... but the magpie
(casual now, indifferent) soon vanishes.