petit songe du solstice

MASS PLANTING

The soaring voices of the Rose Ensemble

filled the cavernous wooden vault

of St. Mary’s with green light

on solstice night.  Meek humble

faces in a crowd become limestone

architecture of high song –

a van der Weyden throng,

a Bruegel mass planting a cornerstone.

When the tender light falls first

& softly on the muddy fringe

of some new edifice... strange

dewy glinting, where the stone burst

from whale-mouth of the earth

(Jonah-Persephone’s deep

crypt, where ages keep)

with fluttery breath of infant birth.

Jonah... Osiris... buried Man...

little Nutcracker King

solving his Sphinx thing,

finally.  Sibylline Isis (Belgian)

murmuring – I am that which was

& is & ever shall be;

no mortal has ever

lifted the veil which covers me.  Cuz,

tell Henry : Rex Pacificus

has found his mate

beyond the Golden Gate –

Magdalen, her gardener (Jesus).

12.22.18

evening of the year

TIRED HAND

November is the evening of the year.

Peasants in Bruegel scenes,

old Hobo has-beens

cluster by each barnyard bonfire.

Smells of farm & mill & stream,

the salt of drying fish.

Legends of Gilgamesh,

Leviathan.  Earth’s drowsy dream

wherein these van der Weyden faces

peer, like wildflowers

(like elemental creatures).

Matrix of sky & sea places,

of perishable limestone prints

from whence a soul emerges

smiling... Demiurge’s

horsehair, flickering (Francesca’s hints).

Medieval bread & wine of things.

Cascade of bridges over

other bridges – river

washing under massive rings.

The solidarity of timebound

beasts, breathing together

under whip, rein, tether.

Muddy, between Arch & Mound

looms... pregnant with Spiritu.

What Piero knew,

Bruegel & Jasper too –

shade-palm, surrounding you

                    *

& me – stretching toward Pacific blue.

I layer watercolors so,

over crepuscular canoe

hid in Italian garage (one almond clue).

The limestone waterfalls in Rimini

like tears across a scallop-

sign.  The curtains drop,

the veil gives way... a human unity

of suffering is all our play.

Da Vinci, with tired hand

limns one command –

love one another, every day.

For we are one.  A multitude,

personified.  Benevolent

Ancient of Days bent

each into the mirror’s flood,

together – riverflow of heart-

veins from the earth

welling to fiery hearth –

lenticular sunset, plangent cloud-art.

So spinning from primordial rose

the golden maize of Chartres

guides you to its Artist...

Daedalus, not Minotaur; Grace

Ravlin, not some puppet-master

in the Kremlin.  Shadow

of Mona Lisa grin... you

rise before the fall (Easter).

11.10.17

Drowsy motion of the river R

FRESH CRUST

The immense raincloud stretched like serpent

or shadow of raven-

wing, on an evening horizon

over the Pacific, just past the unspent

abyss of Golden Gate.  Only here

ice scales an ever-brooding

Mississippi – black Earth blood-

stream (like Nile in winter mirror).

My Neva-Neva land folds history

into an origami crane –

an ever-moving terrapin

lapping on a chain (of clay).

A flower clambers from those rings –

a million-pillowed peacock

Rose, whose eyes flock

van der Weyden faces (channelings

of worm-warp smiles).  Lyre-kings

hung like Christmas bulbs

from every thorn; their clubs

thronged in night circles, chorusing;

the Word was crumbling, in a whirlpool

(Ocean River, circulating

echoing Hector ring)...

‘til Joey the Calabrian (my cool

collaborator) sketched an eagle

plummeting – flipped

up a fresh crust, dipped

in wine & snow – lifted his bugle...

1.7.16

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : painting (label : subject/painting).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)


There are many others...

The painting by Rogier van der Weyden described in poem yesterday is up at MFA in Boston. Hope to go see it this week. (The poem only begins to get at the complexities of this remarkable painting.) Luke was the patron saint of artists. In this picture, he's doing a silver-point sketch of Mary & infant Jesus. In a sense, the painting revolves around two joined (& perpendicular) wheels: first, the wheel from the "onlookers" in the distance, pointing to the tiny church where one could imagine this entire scene is taking place; second, the wheel from Luke's sketch through the Gospel he is writing to this painting as a whole (& thus back to the sketch, or this painting's - & the gospel's - own origin). It's done with spots of light & the linear relationships established between them (a light through a chink in the wall over Mary's head, paralleling a similar light over the writing desk; lines criscrossing through the center of the painting connecting Luke's stylus, the direction of his sketch-pad, the hand of Jesus, the writing desk, the two lights, etc.) - and - and this is important - it's all unified by the fact that the figure of Luke is van der Weyden's self-portrait.

Borges couldn't have fashioned a more subtle self-reflexive design. Besides, it's beautiful, down to a microscopic level: you have to peer at minute features of the clothing, or the coat-of-arms in the stained glass window, or the tiny figures walking in the distant town - or the man pissing against the wall there; and yet it comes together as an integrated whole. & this is one of the great lessons in "fitness" of the old masters: you can't understand the meaning of the details, unless you somehow begin to grasp the meaning, the motive, of the whole image.

& this, of course, teaches us something about "reading" nature, or experience, or reality, as a whole. (which gets back to something I was trying to get at a few days ago, discussing the status of the image in poetry.)

St. Luke Drawing a Portrait


 
 
It’s a game of perception.  The Virgin, calm,
attentive, aims the nipple of one small breast
toward the lips of the laughing Infant.  St. Luke,
draped in flowing vermilion, pauses, looks up
from his sketchbook, his fine black-golden
stylus held there motionless.  It’s a portrait
of the artist (van der Weyden); in a corner
behind him, an ox curls under a writing stand,
where a draft of the third Gospel lies open.
Between pillars in the center, beyond the
garden, on a bridge, in the middle distance,
a man and a woman (with their backs to us)
gaze at a river that glides to the horizon.
The man aims his index finger toward
a far-off spit of shoreline, where
a tiny church is barely visible.
       
                                 (This work
the mirror-image of an earlier one, by Jan
van Eyck, The Rolin Madonna: the kneeling 
donor, holding his book, looks up (entranced 
by mother and child) from the opposite side 
of the room (and painting); in the center,
in the deep distance, the same river,
almost the same onlookers.)
              
                             It’s a game
of perception, with multiple mirrors:
that onlooker’s index, pointing almost
out of the scene, circles back to this room:
St. Luke, looking on, is van der Weyden,
looking on: as we are looking on, absorbed
(as that infant soon will be) in the milky flow.