The Empress Theodora with her Retinue, c.547, in the church of San Vitale, Ravenna
Myriads of tessarae, precisely,minutely fitted,
Shining, bedded on uneven mortar ground,
Reflecting the light at countless slants,
Composed by unknown masters;
Here it was placed to impress the Ravennans
With the majesty and power of the Byzantines,
Recent conquerors of the city.
Theodora stands high above, looking ahead,
In bejewelled triple diadem with long pearl-chains,
And silk cloak of Tyrian amethyst purple,
Beneath a baldachin, elongated and seraphic,
The bear-tamer’s daughter, the bawdy burlesquer,
Exalted among saints and apostles,
Golden nimbus behind her head.
Processing ahead of her stately retinue,
Across the fountained green,
She bears a communion chalice to the church,
While an official draws back the drape from a portal,
Revealing darkness behind the golden glow.
At the Empress’s right stands her confidant, Narses,
That slight and sickly eunuch,uneducated yet clever,
Born an Armenian slave,he had climbed to eminence
Through toil and loyalty, in politics and war,
Standing here modestly, knowing his place,
Arms concealed beneath his cloak.
Fear of rivals and pretenders,
Court intrigues, popular uprisings and coups d’etat
Never ceased to trouble their sleep,
As they aided Justinian in his ambition
To restore the lost borders of the Roman Empire.
Here Theodora fixes us with large dark eyes,
Set in a tense narrow face, no longer young,
Ill, and tormented by burdens of state,
Her husband’s equal partner and beloved.
Where now the girl who had performed on the stage
In bawdy revues, flaunting her beauty,
Winning applause with her comic striptease?
Her Majesty comports herself with dignity,
Good sense and majesty, and indomitable resolve:
As in that year when mobs were rampaging
Through Constantinople, razing whole quarters to the ground,
And besieging the palace, as all around her
Debated flight and exile, only Theodora
Stood firm, refused to flee and urged her husband
To fight, “I shall never take off the purple,” she vowed,
“Nor shall I ever see the day when those around me
Do not address me as empress. The purple
Will make a good shroud.” Strengthened by her hand,
The generals quashed the insurrection.
There,at Theodora’s left,stands her friend Antonina,
Chatelaine of the palace,
Domineering wife of General Belisarius.
No greater ally had the Empress
In ensuring the loyalty of the army
And in quelling intrigues,and running spies,
The two women plotting together
To eliminate any obstacle in their way,
Setting cunning traps for foes and upstarts,
Making sure to see them executed.
And then,on her knees,in church,she would see
Christ before her,above her,one indivisible god,
With nothing base and human in him,
As the foolish churchmen taught;
Let the Pope call her a heretic,
But she would win him in the end,
And all his weak tribe of men!
Miniature for the Month of January from the Très Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry, c.1415, by the Limburg Brothers
Illuminated vellum page, sumptuous and brilliant:
Determined to collect the very finest books,
The Duke of Berry commissioned this one
As a prayer book to be used in his devotions.
The three Flemish Limburg brothers he had hired
For his miniaturists’ workshop,
And lavished gifts and favours on them,
Anxious to keep them happy in his service:
For Paul, the eldest brother, he even arranged
For an eight-year-old girl to be kidnapped
And brought to him, against her parents’ wishes.
A New Year gathering hosted by John, Duke of Berry,
At his Paris palace, the Hôtel de Nesle,
On 1 January 1413;the elderly duke is seated
Beneath a baldachin, the uncle of the king of France,
Robed in gold-embroidered blue,
With the baldachin adorned with the fleur de lis
And the ducal emblems, the bear and the swan.
Guests crowd around,warming their hands at the fire;
In the background hangs a tapestry of the Trojan War,
Soldiers armed in fifteenth-century style;
The duke is in his element, surrounded by all he loves-
Loyal friends, servants and dogs, fine raiment,
Costly gold plate, and gourmet foods,
(It was he who introduced truffles into French cuisine).
The first day of the year was his special feast,
When kings and princes of the blood royal
Exchanged precious jewels and gave their courtiers
Large rewards for their loyal service;
And, in return, his allies and liegemen
Competed to please him with appropriate presents.
Munificent beyond his means, forever in debt
To his ambitions, Berry never hesitated to lavish
Yet more funds on the grandest entertainments,
Determined to be the most stylish of noblemen,
To outdo all his niggardly rivals in splendour.
How could it ever be deemed a waste
To expend treasure, however exorbitant,
On building palaces and monuments to oneself
That posterity will marvel at, witnessing
What a paragon among rulers can achieve.
He erected one palace after another,
Each grander, larger, more costly than the last,
With a new elegance unlike the stolid castles
Of his peers; slender-towered beauties,
With pointed roofs and stonework most ornate.
So ruthlessly did he tax his territories
To fund these dreams, that the cities rose up
Against him, detesting this no-good bastard
Who conducted the king’s affairs
With such arrogance and avarice,
In love with his own devious diplomacy,
In times of plague and war,when France
Lay waste, abandoned to her plight.
Berry loved dogs more than any human being,
And, here,in the picture,his greyhound sits,
Being treated like a prince by its attendant,
While, among the dishes on the banqueting table,
The duke’s two small Pomeranian spitzes,
Wander freely, pampered beyond reason.
There, among the richly garbed guests,
The man in plain woolen cap,looking on,
Is Paul of Limburg,sneaking himself
Wryly into the scene.
At this festivitiy, the Limburg brothers
Jokingly gave the duke a present:
A dummy book, made of wood,
Bound in white velvet and gilded silver clasps,
With no pages and no writing inside.
Shortly after this very miniature was painted
The Limburg brothers and the duke of Berry
All died, leaving the Book of Hours unfinished,
While France was plunged into disaster,
As civil war erupted anew, and the English
Invaded, and made most of France their own.
The Adoration of the Lamb, Hubert and Jan van Eyck, 1432
Now the second paradise:
God’s chosen people dwelling, resurrected
On earth, in a perfected landscape,
The dove of the Holy Spirit winging above,
Bestowing its rays in benediction.
Standing, kneeling or approaching in procession,
From the four cardinal points
Come saints and martyrs; prophets and people
Who lived before Christ; high churchmen
And women, too,so low in the world’s esteem;
With, in the centre, the bleeding lamb on an altar,
And in the foreground risesthe scintillating
Fountain of everlasting life.
Beyond those lush fields stands a city,
The new Jerusalem, descended to earth,
Geometrical and radiant,
Where God’s elect may live blessed lives
Of contemplation and prayer.
The heavenly city resembles Ghent itself,
Progressive in industry,prosperous
From commerce and taxation,
Where the van Eycks painted this canvas
And installed it as an altarpiece
In St Bavo’s church; commissioned by burghers
Avid to see their hometown exalted.
The brothers’ were the first hands dipped
In oils,the first to lay down depths of lustre
With sudden new skill and perspective.
Potsdamer Platz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1914
Midnight: figures totter at awkward angles
Across a tilting crooked world,
Robotic, zombie-like, almost colliding,
Green and weird, disturbed and disturbing.
Simultaneously from different planes,
Their curves and acute angles clash
In tension, the figures hurry to and fro,
In constant motion, averting their eyes
From each other, their bodies atrophied.
The two cocottes in feathered hats
Walk with regal dignified air,
Temple prostitutes of Berlin;
One advances towards the viewer
With impenetrable green mask
Through the gas attack of time.
From a pavement cafe Kichner watches
The world disintegrate;the freedom
He craves is being smelted into a bullet
Which will end in his own heart.
Paris Street, Rainy Day, Gustave Caillebotte, 1877
Criss-crossing at the intersection
On broad empty avenues under uniform facades,
They hurry over wet cobblestones, shielding themselves
With umbrellas from the rain and from each other,
Absorbed in their own private thoughts,
Careful not to look at anyone.
In the foreground a couple are walking together,
Looking away from one another,
The woman veiled like an Arab, -
With the luminous dot of a pearl in her ear
Catching the eye, like a fierce distant star,
Brighter than anything else in the picture.
It is Haussmann’s geometry
Of long straight lines and symmetry,
Designed to quash rebellious hearts.
No more history and mythology:
Caillebotte,ensconced inside a carriage,
Selects his angle and sketches,
Teasing out equations from the hurly-burly,
Peering through the rain.
Women of Algiers in their Apartments, Eugène Delacroix, 1834
He was one of that generation
Reared on tales of heroism and glory,
Cheated and disillusioned
By the drab reality of their world
Ruled by Bourbons, bankers and merchants,
Oppressed by boredom and melancholy.
In the delirium of North Africa,
He wandered violently happy,
The enemy in his lungs suppressed,
The evil moods forgotten,
Sketching quickly surreptitiously all the time,
A dangerous image-maker
Among the iconoclasts.
This bestial dirty ignorant treacherous chaos
Was wondrous colour and abundance
To his heretical eyes.
Back in his Paris studio,surrounded
By sketchbooks,he fabricates a Barbary
Enticing to European tastes,
The harem he visited in Algiers
Made colour,mystery and luxury incarnate,
A vision of escape,portrayed
With painstaking accuracy and fakery.
Indolent and passive, the women
Loll in their forbidden demesne,
Chatting and smoking,awaiting the master,
Provocative under sheer cloth.
Carefully he finishes the profile
Of the woman with the hookah,
Drawn from his studio model’s face;
And traces a farrago of Arabic and invention
On the panel behind the negress.
The Sharper, Georges de La Tour, c.1630
With only looks and gestures they communicate,
The gamblers at the table,
Playing for high stakes.
A heap of gold coins sprawls before the young gentleman,
The greenhorn about to be fleeced,
While the cardsharper opposite secretly produces
A hidden ace of diamonds from behind his back,
And leans nonchalantly forward,bent
On correcting the errors of fortune,
So apt to award the world’s riches
To the talentless and undeserving.
Gazing out,he makes us his accomplice,
Villains all,doomed to lose a thumb or hand
If caught,be branded,or led to the scaffold.
Isn’t it worth it,for those moments of victory
When one holds just the perfect cards in one’s hand,
And holds the world to ransom?
(This,perhaps,is the artist’s own visage,
Relishing his own wiles in wartime,
A baker’s son with a noble wife,
Grown rich and renowned,but not above
A little profiteering and speculation,
His arrogant temper likes to vent itself
On knaves and pests, chastising them
With his fists,as he curses his way
To distinction, trampling his inferiors
Just as those armies plunder and battle
Across the burning land.
Between them the courtesan, who lured the lad here
With her beauty,slyly signals with white manicured hand
To the sharper to play his hidden ace
As she casts him a calculating sideways glance,
While a maid pours red wine
Into Venetian crystal glasses
To befuddle the victim all the more.
In times of war,plague and famine,
What harm is there in a little sport,
To forget one’s woes at the gaming table?
What a fine gentleman,chubbycheeked and pouting,
Resplendent in shiny pearl-grey jerkin,
Richly embroidered in gold and silver,
With shoulder bands of red silk,
His cuffs delicately pleated and trimmed in black gold...
Once they have robbed the little ninny,
Theywill strip him of those pretty threads as well!
Lucifer himself invented games of chance,
With a pack of cards to be his missal.
Nothing pleases him more than to gamble for souls.
Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of her Sisters, School of Fontainebleau, c.1600
The two witchy sisters sit up in the marble bathtub,
Framed by the baldachin’s red silk curtains,
Bathing in milk or wine to preserve their youth,
Perfectly coiffed and made up,bedizened with pearls.
What do they care if the Church condemns bathing
As licentious and immoral,a dangerous innovation?
Nor do they heed astrologers who advise that baths
Be taken only when the moon is waning.
They know,of course,that Satan himself
Loves to fornicate with witches in the bathtub
And show them,reflected in the water,
Their future husbands’ faces.
No such warnings deter them,so wilful are they.
And after all,even goddesses,are wont
To emerge from springs and rivers,
Even as court beauties vie for the services
Of the finest painters to portray them
Rising naked from the primordial waters
In the Italian style.Such things enhance one’s prestige.
Gabrielle and Julienne are no slouches:
Self-advancement is their expertise.
Gabrielle is the ideal beauty,and knows it:
Religiously she dyes her famous hair blonde
With acid tinctures and sunlight,
Maintains a nacreous translucent complexion,
Applying a thick white cosmetic mask each day,
Plucking her eyebrows,rouging her nipples and lips.
The proof of her supremacy is that so many
Hate her,curse the king’s slut as an evil witch,
A nymphomaniac,possessed by the Devil,
Her rank hole belonging to his icy cock.
That long straight smooth sturdy body
She forces into the tightest corset,
Obliterating bosom,hips and waist
With the discipline of a natural soldier.
All France know what whores they are,
All the women of that malignant clan,-
Cock and cash is all they live for!
Hard to say which of them is worse,
Gabrielle or Julienne, the duchess of Villars,
A woman who cannot go one day
Without a good rogering and pursues any man
She fancies without restraint.
Sweet,how they share the tub :
Julienne playfully tweaks her sister’s rouged nipple,
As they both look out insouciantly,
Playing the innocent,
Gleefully planting lewd thoughts in our minds.
Perhaps Gabrielle is pregnant again,
Having already borne the king several children
And secured his affections and honour,
Rewarded by him with gold and titles,
And treated by all as a queen,
The hem of whose robe all must kiss.
See,on her finger she wears the engagement ring
Given her by Henri IV.
She died in childbirth before he could wed her,
The year before this work was painted.
Some believed she had been poisoned,
So hated was she by the people of France,
For her hedonism and extravagance
While the country suffered civil war,famine and pestilence.
In the background of the picture
A woman is sewing at a table by the fireplace,
With a green-velvet-covered coffin beside her,
And a dark mirror above her head.
The Fountain of Youth, Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1546
It might be a Swiss spa,this pool
Where the women bathe and rejuvenate
Their ageing flesh,heal their ailments
By the grace of God.
With a mocking eye,the ancient artist,
Longing for health and vigour,
Made this painting
For a male patron to enjoy
The naked young women cavorting
In the waters.
This is how the ecosystem works:
Into one side of the pool decrepit crones
Totter and are carried, praying for a miracle,
And, immersed in the waters, turn
Into frisky young beauties,
Wallowing with mad delight like children,
Then emerge on the other side
As rejuvenated maidens,
Welcomed by affluent old gentlemen
Waiting simply there to woo them
And find new wives in their later years.
Lot and his Daughters, Netherlandish Master, c.1530
Lot and his daughters
Are celebrating their blessed escape ,
Having set up camp with luxurious tents,
While in the background the city burns.
Fire rains down from the night sky;
Buildings tilt and collapse;
Ships break up and sink in the harbour.
A world destroyed by lust
That only lust can save.
A sudden widower,randy and drunk,
Lot sits fondling one of his reluctant daughters,
While the other dutifully pours out more wine.
Whoever painted this knew that he lived
In the Last Times,that Sodom would soon
Be punished for its depravity.
And yet he must go on working all the same;
Keep at his painting,his prayers.
The Melun Diptych, Jean Fouquet, c.1456
Etienne Chevalier, the royal treasurer,
The donor of this work,kneels in prayer,
With St Stephen, his patron saint, standing beside him,
In blue dalmatic with gold braid, holding the Gospels
And one of the stones with which he was martyred,
Ready to intercede for Chevalier with the Virgin Mary,
Hovering on her throne borne by angels,
A pagan goddess of disturbing glamour,
One of her plump provocative breasts exposed.
In her lap sits the infant Jesus, pointing his forefinger
Towards chevalier, to indicate that his prayer
Is heard and he may hope for divine clemency.
For centuries this diptych hung above the tomb
Of Etienne Chevalier in the church of Notre Dame
In his birthplace, Melun,intended to preserve
His memory in perpetuity,
Together with the masses said every morning
For the repose of his immortal soul.
The treasurer,in a maroon fur-lined robe,
Kneels in a palatial hallway,
Like those in his Paris mansion.
The king liked to have such talented commoners
In his service,owing all to his favour,
And taking his side against the nobility
With their ceaseless intrigues and revolts.
With Chevalier’s help,Charles VII
Finally drove the English from France,
As the treasurer procured the vast sums
To finance the long military campaigns
And once even lent the king money himself;
Though he amassed a great fortune of his own,
Chevalier was known to be honest and incorruptible,
A good man amidst a court of cheats and liars.
Marmoreal and mesmeric is the Virgin’s skin,
Her eyes cast downward,a seductive statue,
Modelled on the king’s mistress, Agnès Sorel,
A great champion of Chevalier’s career,
And possibly his secret lover as well;
Called the greatest beauty in the world,
She,alone of all women,was permitted
To appear before the court at tournaments
Mounted on a stallion,in gleaming silver armour
Studded with jewels, an Amazon;
While in church she artfully displayed pious anguish
Over her sins,yet wearing extravagant robes
With lace headdresses and prodigious trains,
Her décolleté scandalously low , even showing the nipples.
The king was utterly beguiled by her
And heeded her counsel in matters of state,
For she alone could rouse him from lethargy
And inspire him with the courage and will to act,
To fight on till the English were vanquished.
She died before this picture was painted,
In childbirth, still young,her powers at their full,
And even if she was a sinner,was remembered
With holiness,as the mistress of a king.
St Jerome, Antonello da Messina, c.1460-1475
In Messina Antonella painted this canvas ,
Stuck in a godforsaken backwater,
Far from the cities he yearned for,
Far from Florence with its patrons and scholars
And the Naples of his prentice years.
In this port he spent most of his life,
Watching the ships come and go
In all directions,a stonemason’s son
Born with a craftsman’s passions.
He had studied well the Flemish masters
And felt the exotic glamour of detail,
The plenitude of everyday objects.
His southern heart,bred on superstition,
Battened on perspective,this new sorcery
Extending men’s powers with its grace;
He must unite north and south in his body.
Look into this building and beyond,
Through vaults and shadows
To the lion limping towards Jerome,
One thorn-stricken forepaw drawn up,
For the saint to nurse.
In the distance are mountains and rivers,
And the towers and white walls
Of Messina, citadel of the Devil,
The dungeon of the flesh,
While in the east stretches the desert,
A wilderness of trees and hills,
The ascetic’s paradise, where he may liberate
His soul through solitude and prayer.
Dead centre of the painting the saint himself
Sits, reading in his cell,
Red-robed like a cardinal;
Forerunner of humanists,lord of translators,
The man who had meditated for years
In the Syrian desert,struggling with desire..
Practising his Flemish techniques,
Antonello bound his pigments with oils
In the foreground we see a peacock,
The paradisal bird of Christ,
Herald of eternal life,a bowl of water
Set beside him like baptismal font;
On the left a partridge opposes,
The thief of other birds’ eggs,
The devil setting traps for the young.
The Ship of the Argonauts, Ercole de’ Roberti/Lorenzo Costa, c.1480/1490
The sails are full, the ship casts off,
The crew gaze back to the rocky fantastical shore;
The dark vessel hovers over the milky sea;
In the stern stands Hercules, with lion’s fell
Over his brawny shoulder and club in his fist;
Faithful beside him stands young Hylas,
His squire and lover, and in the forecastle
Jason, the captain,keeps watch;the adventure
Is under way,the Golden Fleece yet to be won.
The Argo flies the red and white colours
Of the Estes,the same their jockeys wore
In races,dashing to victory or hell.
This picture ,painted in Ferrara,
Once adorned a noble bridal chest
That carried the dowry to the groom’s house
Then was placed beside the connubial bed;
A chest commissioned by the Estes,
Marrying off Duke Ercole’s eldest daughter
To Francesco Gonzaga of Mantua,
With the nuptial ceremonies also arranged
By Ercole de’Roberti himself.
Such was the Estes’ beloved impresa:
Ships sailing before a strong wind
The emblem of their pride and power,
Blazoned on frescoes,paintings and coins;
From Hercules they claimed descent,
Shrewd despots, exploiting their position
In the Po delta,developing the port
And ruling the river and its wealth,
Levying customs duties on all trade,
And keeping profitless war at bay,
Playing off the larger powers against each other,
Forever changing sides to suit themselves.
No other state in Italy enjoyed such order.
A small marshy backwater had been turned
Into a capital of culture and style,
Where artists evolved apart from the world,
Oblivious to vogues and innovations.
Despite the dull efficiency of cannon,
The Este condottieri saw themselves
As knights on legendary steeds,charging
To Arthurian glory;they could not resist
Voyages,pilgrimages and adventures,
To embellish their honourable name.
The Tempest, Giorgione, c.1507
To their country houses they always returned,
To the pastoral idylls read about in books,
As if they, Venetian patricians, could share
The simple happiness of shepherds.
Giorgione was a favourite: they hung
His works in their private apartments,
And he played the lute at their salons,
His watchful eyes fading into dream.
How he delighted in his ciphers,
Disguising the too-precious meanings,
The truth known,if at all,only to him.
To keep them guessing was his passion,
To make them argue over interpretations.
They could deem themselves initiates,
Yet never be sure of their rightness.
He,too,in the end,could only accept
The miracles as they revealed themselves,
One thing growing out of another
With mysterious connection and grace,
Sudden and timeless,just colour,after all.
The lightning bolt illuminates
The shepherd standing calmly to one side,
Observing the naked woman, child at bosom,
While she looks questioningly out into our eyes,
Broken columns lit up behind..
The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, Konrad Witz, 1444
He has risen from the dead and must prove it.
He stands upon the water, on Lake Geneva’s southern shore,
With the Petit Salève, the Môle Pointu, the tops of the Voirons,
And the summit of Mont Blanc behind;
As Peter and other disciples draw up a net full of fish
From the spot where he told them to cast;
The topographic detail all minutely accurate,
As observed by Witz,feeling the space in his hands,
Portraying this idyll as a tribute
To Amadeus VIII, Duke of Savoy.
Who had consolidated his lands through strategic treaties,
Married into the Burgundian dynasty most shrewdly,
And extended his influence south of the Alps
By wedding his own daughter to a Visconti.
Amadeus ran a model system of government
And,with dignity,aged fifty, his powers-at the full,
Handed over his state to his two sons,
Left his luxurious court at Chambéry
And withdrew to a monastery on Lake Geneva,
Where he lived a pious hermit’s life.
Though he kept out of the tedious everyday business,
He retained some of his old authority,
For his sons still needed his counsel and approval,.
Honoured as a judious ruler and pious son of the Church,
Amadeus was elected Pope by the Council of Basle,
And so was crowned as Felix V,
Choosing the arms of Savoy, a white cross with broad arms.
But the Pontiff in Rome refused to be supplanted
And so the Church was split between two rivals,
With more and more countries declaring their allegiance
To Rome, until,accepting fate,Felix V stepped down,
Only to die two years later.
This figure of Peter swimming ashore to Jesus,
Is modelled on Amadeus himself.
Was this painting commissioned by Felix V himself?
Or perhaps by the Bishop of Geneva,
Whom Felix V elevated to cardinal after his coronation?
There were others,too,who had done well
Out of the schism,and who loved Savoy.
Konrad Witz both adored and renounced the visible,
Determined to guide the viewer back to God,
From here,from now,from Geneva,by the lake.
Ludovico Gonzaga and His Family, Andrea Mantegna, c.1470
Gold-embossed leather curtains are drawn back to reveal a terrace:
The Gonzaga clan,dressed in gold spun cloth, is assembled
Before a marble screen among the lemon trees.
Ludovico sits with a letter in his hand, conferring with a secretary,
And his wife, Marchioness Barbara of Brandenburg has a little son and daughter at her knee,-
The children thin and pale and sickly.
Sombre officials in dark clothes stand beside haughty flamboyant courtiers;
Rubino, the marquis’s dog, sits under his chair, and a dwarf stands next to the Marchioness.
Though their small domain is modest compared to Venice and Milan,
And Mantua,their capital,, marshy and insalubrious,
Though they suffer from gout,rickets,malaria and poverty,
They present themselves as a grand and mighty clan.
Ludovico makes great efforts to attract the best artists and architects to his court,
And for three years tries to coax young Mantegna into his service;
Astonished by his frescoes at Padua,
Until the artist,reluctant to tie himself to tedious routine,
Relents at the promise of riches and titles,
But above all because of the marquis’s cultivated taste and respect.
With this fresco Mantegna transformed a small reception room in the Ducal Palace,
Seeming to extend its space through the walls and ceiling,
This Ludovico in the fresco is an old man,
In a simple housecoat, without fineries,
Worn out by his long reign and ill health;
Once a successful condottiere, he had no interest in war and booty ,
But peace was a luxury he could seldom afford,
Forced to command the armies of both Venice and Milan,
Whichever offered the highest fee.
For he had a lavish court to maintain,and a stable of horses.
Here, in the picture,-this white-haired old man-
Is Vittorino da Feltre, Ludovico’s old teacher and court librarian,
Whose famous School for Princes attracted pupils to Mantua
From all over Italy, including many future rulers.
Which of them might become Vittorino’s ideal,
The uomo universale,the whole man of vigour and spirit,
Rich in both Christian duty and classical values,
A ruler who would make himself immortal
By honouring great men and high principles?
Well might it be Ludovico himself,that paragon of intellect
And action,the champion of his city,his family and his lands,
The lover and patron of arts and ideas.
His two eldest sons, posed either side of Vittorino,
Were brought up in the same spirit,
Federico, the heir, -whose hunch back is hidden-
Reigned as both soldier and patron of the arts,
While Francesco, obese and sickly, became a cardinal
And sired a great collection of Classical antiques.
The dwarf in their midst, some say, was a daughter
Of the reigning couple,for all manner of defects
Cursed the Gonzagas,generation after generation,
Borne with stoicism and prayer.
The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli, c.1486
The waves,the trees,the roses floating to earth,the robes ,the tresses of Venus, the wind blows through all;
Aphrodite, wave-born, riding a breath of wind,
Approaches the shore on a seashell,
The fruit of anatomical studies and Classical models,
With the influence of Greek sculpture in the way her weight rests on one leg,
In the curve of her hip, in her shielding of her pudenda;
After a thousand years, a pagan nude has come forth again,
In accordance with the canon of Polyclitus.
Onshore the Hora waits to receive the goddess,
Red roses wound round her waist, anemones at her feet and a cornflower-spangled dress,
Holding out a purple gown for the goddess, swaddling for newborns,shroud for the dead.
The painting was intended for a country villa outside Florence,
For a banker reposing after business in the cool shade,
Preferring a light-hearted theme to sombre religiosity.
Brush in hand,Botticelli felt the gods in his limbs,
The splendour of antique gems engraved with Roman goddesses,
And humanists’ translations of the Classics,
He sealed this talisman wth the elements,
And set it free to do its work..
He could not know how it would end:
His life cast on the Bonfire of Vanities,
The angelic images returning as demons,
As he tossed by night alone on his hard bed.
The Death of Procris, Piero di Cosimo, c.1500
In the marshy meadow she lies among flowers,
The maiden bleeding from her wounds,
Wrapped in red and gold veil;
A faun bends over her.A hunting dog sits at her feet.
Three hounds roam the heron-sentinelled shore beyond-
One white, one black, one red-brown,-
And a swan sails on the water,
In the dreamy dawn light,
With no vanishing point.
So it ends, a tale of jealousy and mistrust,
Of happiness wantonly destroyed.
What possessed poor Cephalus,newly wed,
To test his bride’s faithfulness by courting her
Disguised as another man?
Was it her fault she wavered and was tempted?
Ashamed and enraged when she learned the truth,
Procris fled to the forest,to Diana’s protection,
But was horribly slain by her own husband’spear
As she spied on him out hunting
And he mistook her for an animal in the bush.
Piero could not get them out of his head:
The Bitch of Coracesium and the Armenian Hound,
The solid and the volatile states of matter,
That he might by his mind’s fire fuse into the swan.
He prayed to Hermes Trismegistus to lead him
Through the underworld,armed with arcane sciences,
In search of immortality and the Philosophers’ Stone.
Locked up indoors,reclusive among the filth,
Boiling fifty eggs at a time to keep him going,
The young brave grew weird and morbid,
Could hardly even remember the festival of 1511,
When he created an enormous chariot for Lorenzo de’Medici,
Bearing a huge figure of Death, scythe in hand,
Surrounded by tombs,which,when the procession halted,
Opened to let skeletons leaptout and sing Grief, Woe and Penitence
To the shocked and delighted crowd.
The Haywain, Hieronymus Bosch, c.1485-1490
Did he feel himself persecuted by demons
With only his art for exorcism?
Or was it the Church he must keep at bay?
Perched high atop the cart,
A lutenist and a young couple are making music,
Flanked by an angel, beseeching Christ in heaven,
And a devil, interrupting the love songs
With a blast of his trumpet nose.
Halfconcealed in the bush is a kissing couple,
Spied on by a peeping tom,
While an emperor, king and a pope ride behind the wagon,
And men and women scramble to plunder the hay,
Fighting each other for it,falling under its wheels.-
The wagon is pulled by demons from the underworld,
With people streaming out of a mound of earth with a wooden door .
Between paradise and hell..
Onward it rolls,the haywain,into the future,
Towards the day of reckoning,
Attracting thieves,gluttons,mountebanks and corrupt clergy,
While Bosch fills his hands with prayers and proverbs,
An anti-Pope of shadows and spiderwebs.
In St John’s Church,
He kneels before the wonder-working Virgin,
And the cosmos shrinks to a candleflame;
Leering devils and monsters circle around,
Determined to lure him to perdition.
The Last Days are imminent,
Heralded by plagues and floods,
And men are in terror,
Knowing how greatly they have sinned.
Poor man,more likely to fall into the sty
Than to rise with the angels!
Every event seems an omen of the Antichrist.
Hell is here and now,the monstrous engine
Of retribution,mutilating and consuming
Its victims,tormenting them with infinite ingenuity,
Each vice receiving its just punishment.
The laws of God are turned on their heads.
The Battle of Issus, Albrecht Altdorfer, 1529
Under the dragon-dark and thunderous sky,
The immense maelstrom seethes and swirls,
Armageddon’s legions fighting to the death,
Golden-armoured Alexander at the centre,
Pursuing the fugitive Darius’s chariot
With lance held high,the soldiers dressed
For the sixteenth century,the enemy
More like Turks than Persians.
Who can doubt that mankind now lives
In the seventh and final age,
Damned by its own corruption and evil?
Even the greatest men on earth can do nothing
To alter the predestined end;
God alone disposes what must be.
Even as the gallant and illustrious Greeks
Defeat the East and initiate the next grand era,
They move the world further towards its doom,
True to a religion of which they know nothing.
Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria,viewing
The work he commissioned to glorify
The Classical heroes of his boyhood dreams,
Can only turn away with a shudder
And hurry to the Saviour in his chapel.
Venus of Urbino, Titian, c.1538
From an old man a young man demanded truth.
Guidobaldo della Rovere, the Duke of Urbino’s son,
Commissioned this work, in his twenty-sixth year,
From venerable Titian ,the most famous of artists,
To mark his wedding.
Who was she,the model? Titian’s own mistress,
Or a prostitute?There she reclines, on the four-poster,
Coyly concealing with one hand her mons veneris,
Clasping in the other a bouquet of roses.
On the window ledge stands a pot of myrtle,
A promise of constancy in marriage.
At her feet sleeps a lapdog.
Titian emphasises her right shoulder,
Her small round firm pert breasts,
The gently rounded belly, fertile and alluring,
Her nudity,plain and real,
With her drab fully clothed servants busy in the background,
The maid’s rump towards us as she rummages in a chest.
This Venus meets your gaze,expecting admiration,
She knows the age of mythologies is over.
Your eye moves with Titan’s hand and eye,
That cantankerous moneygrubbing speculator
As in love with property as with paint,
A ruthless opportunist of the heart,
Practising the science of the senses
As he gazes out from his window across the lagoon,
To the Dolomites,his birth,his death.
Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park, Diego Rivera, 1948
All the ages of Mexico are happening simultaneously,
Right here on Sunday afternoon in Alameda Park,
Where people sit, stroll, chat and picnic.
Everyone is here: the famous and the obscure, figures from myth and religion,
And Diego Rivera’s own family,
And ordinary citizens, Indians, farmworkers, the poor.
A thin boy is picking the pocket of a well-dressed gentleman,
An Indian woman in a yellow dress is striking a provocative pose,
A policeman is expelling a family of Indians from the park,
And a pink hot air balloon floats above all their heads,
Carrying their hopes into the clouds.
Hernán Cortés stands there with bloody hands,
The heroic slaughterer,the subjugator and annihilator,
Courageous and cruel in equal measure.
Beside him is Fray Juan de Zumarraga,
Who set about converting the Indians to Christianity,
Burning their sacred books.
And the condemned of the Inquisition wait in their tall pointed hats,
Before the flames in which they will perish.
This mural was intended for the dining room of the El Prado hotel,
But scandal and protest put paid to that,
It had to be hidden behind a wall for years.
Only after Rivera changed the small inscription “God does not exist”
Written on the piece of paper held up by Ignacio Ramírez,
Was it allowed back out on display:
We see,too,the Emperor Maximilian,who was soon deposed and shot,
And President Madero,who was soon deposed and shot,
And Zapata,the hero on horseback,the bringer of justice,
Another man betrayed and murdered in the end,
Although he,at least,was rumoured to be immortal
And would one day surely return to save the poor.
There has aways been a lot of deposing and shooting,
Perhaps a little too much.
In the centre Rivera portrays himself as a plump little boy,
In shorts and straw boater,
With a frog and a snake poking out of his pockets,
While his future wife Frida Kahlo stands beside him,
Layng her hand protectively on his shoulder.
Death,that good neighbour,that friend and reveller,
Stands, dressed as a woman in a plumed hat and feather boa,
Holding the hand of the boy Rivera on one side
And that of José Guadalupe Posada on the other,
The first two Mexican artists to free themselves from European art.
There is no grief here,only celebration,
The dead enjoy a party as much as the living,
Or maybe more,maybe more.
Metropolis Triptych, Otto Dix, 1928
Everyone was mutilated,and no-one was beautiful,
And those who danced most were the saddest of all,
In the city of the disillusioned,the crippled,the obscene.
They were frenzied and apathetic,exhilarated and despairing,
They had thrown off their uniforms but the war was not over,
Only the trenches were invisible now
And no-one was handing out medals.
The nightmares continued,nearly every night,
You might piss yourself uncontrollably
Or cry like a baby
Or paint pictures like Otto Dix.
He was that man in the frame,disfigured,with wooden legs,
Hobbling along,crucified, on crutches.
The Negro jazz musician throws his head back, laughing,
And swallows the world with insatiable appetite.
The revellers in the club seem bored and detached,
The shorthaired streamlined boyish flappers,
The ostrich-plumed vamp in heavy mascara,
Free to enjoy their own self-disgust,
Laughing romance and chivalry in the face,
Far too sophisticated for all that.
Berlin could never be home again:
Nothing could ever be safe and cosy again.
You could not tell left from right,or north from south.
You just knew there was something else coming,
That this was not the end of it, not yet.
Everywhere is fake and uncomfortable:
The garish lighting in the dance bar,
The brothel lights infecting the cobbles,
Bits and pieces of the streets and buildings
Are piled on top of each other,haphazardly,
Everything is too close together or too far apart.
Christ’s Entry into Brussels, James Ensor, 1888
Here comes the carnival parade,with flags and banners,led by a military band,
This remorseless mass of faces advancing in a nightmare,
Calling for revolution and social justice,
And one wonders if Christ is truly leading the oppressed
Or has somehow got caught up in it all by mistake.
He wears the artist’s own bewildered face,
Isolated even amid the crowd.
Ensor never missed the Ostend carnival,
Mingling with the masked crowd in fancy dress,
Seduced and terrified by the grotesques,
The ugly philistines he suffered from every day.
With pencil and brush he took revenge,
Showing the brutes their own savage faces,
What did he know of friends or women?
He was always himself,alone.
He had come to deliver the people
And found himself derided and ignored.
Even the Son of God would find that annoying.
So let the critics crucify him,
His greatness would triumph in the end.
In front of Christ the brass band march,
Proudly proclaiming their righteousness,
When in truth they are His enemies,
Playing Pontius Pilate’s favourite tunes.
The Turkish Bath, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1863
An old man of eighty-two,proud
Still to feel the passions of youth,
He worked on as hard as ever at his easel,
Concentrating a life’s work in one canvas,
A theme brooded for half a century
Until the time was right…
He did not even need a single model,
Having amassed a huge collection
Of sketches over the years,women held
In mind for the secret constant purpose,
Returning again and again to these figures
With pen and brush…
A vision of nude beauties,relaxing,chatting,
Drinking coffee and sherbert,
Attended by slave girls,
In an Orient he had never visited,
United by the Golden Section,
In Classical harmony,luxury and ease.
These were the women he loved:
Thick-necked,full-bodied,
With large dull eyes and round limbs,
Dreamy and lethargic,
In whom he felt the fulsomeness
Of nature,and glorious health,
Were disapproving quacks diagnosed them
As “possessing the symptoms
Of a thyroid disorder”.
The Massacre by the Triumvirate, Antoine Caron, 1566
Soldiers pursue their prey across the open square,
Cutting them down and setting their heads in a row,
The victims try in vain to flee up flights of steps
And across the rooves,while the gloating triumvirs
Sit passing judgment on their enemies and watching
Their agonies with glee,among the triumphal arches
And grand buildings of ancient Rome,just as described
By Appian in his History,following Caesar’s murder.
A stranger to Rome,Caron worked from engravings
By other artists,positioning the buildings at random,
Making errors of scale,in this his first large canvas,
Determined to impress his client at all costs
With sensational style, contrasts and surprises
To suit a violent world;the shorn-off heads
And gutted corpses glare with lurid colour,
The murderers pose elegantly under banners
In a courtly spectacle of their own imagination,
Their gestures exaggerated and mannered.
The vast frantic teeming square seems weirdly empty,
As desperate figures race through serene grandeur
Of symmetrical terraces and staircases,
An architecture of balance and permanence.
Atrocities were all the rage in those days.
At the court of Catherine de’Medici,Caron observed
Fanatics conspiring to inflame religious wars,
Exploiting France’s ills to their own ends,
Even as they presided over murders and massacres,
The generals,Catholic and Huguenot alike,
Loved to commission paintings of their hecatombs
With themselves as heroes,revelling in spectacles
Of cruelty and horror,executed to their orders.
Wearily,gratefully,Caron undertook his task.
As they dipped their hands in blood,so he his brush.
Caesar Augustus and the Tiburtine Sybil, Antoine Caron, c.1580
Amidst civil war and poverty, the French court stages a festival,
A distraction from unwelcome realities:
In the grounds of the Tuileries, two armoured knights joust,
While a bargeful of musicians and singers nears the riverbank.
And a crowd enjoy a play performed on an estrade,
By actors in Roman costume,
The Mystery of the Incarnation and Birth of Jesus Christ.
It is the scene where Caesar Augustus, kneeling in purple gown
And laurel wreath, consults the Sybil of Tiber,
Begging her to predict the fate of the Empire,
Whereupon she points to the heavens,-
There, the Virgin and her child appear in a nimbus,
A new era promised in their eyes.
To demonstrate the majesty of the young king, Henri III,
Munificent patron of court festivals,
Caron paints this work on the Queen Mother’s orders,
A talisman made to her specifications.
Catherine de’Medici herself holds the centre of the painting,
A woman to her children, and to power,
Unashamed in her murders and assassinations,
Tirelessly arbitrating between Catholics and Huguenots,
Skilled in using others’ passions and interests to her own ends.
She alone adored her son,that effeminate ninny,
So unloved by his people,and his court;
To distract sectarian leaders from fighting
She kept them busy with feasts and masquerades,
With court balls and tournaments and plays,
Designed with endless care in minute detail
To showcase the king with myth and allegory,
By teams of the finest artists, architects and craftsmen.
Here,the young king watches the joust,
Seated with his favourites, handsome foppish catamites,
With whom he loves to carouse in women’s clothes
Before he returning,penitent,to spiritual exercises.
See,how the French court rivals ancient Rome,
Classical edifices, columns,arches and temples
Erected to laud the monarch, by sympathetic magic.
The artifice is perfect,disproportionate,real and unreal.
In the background a nude female figure poses on a well,
Spouting oil from her breasts, a shining mirror balanced
On her head, the fulfilment of a prophecy,
Such as Catherine de’Medici had read of
In the Sibylline Books she kept by her bed,
Consulting them fervently for guidance at all times.
She herself identified with the Sybils,
And built an observatory next to her palace
Where astrologers were invited to work,
And were consulted,along with necromancers,
As to the auspicious times and places for her festivals,
To ensure the most potent sympathetic magic
And sway her chosen guests to her designs.
Judith and Holofernes, Caravaggio, c.1599
Determined and disgusted,she grits her teeth
And gets on with the job,
Measuring her force and holding aloof
From the victim,beautiful and demure,
As she saws the defenceless Assyrian’s neck,
His eyes staring out of his head,still alive
And in mortal dread,mouth wrenched open
In a scream.The ecstasy of the kill
Enacts its grim seduction.
Out of the darkness the images arise,
Into the darkness they return.
Again and again,Caravaggio returns
To the matter of beheading,
Sticking out his own neck for the blade to fall.
He was drawn to public executions always,
Observed the condemned’s last moments
With fascination,while bandits marauded
Across the countryside,ravaging the villages
Of peasants ruined by taxes and bad harvests.
Before long he will leave his easel
And head out onto the streets once more,
Looking for action,his sword at his side,
Ever more erratic as the work grows scarce,
With churchmen offended by his brutal style,
So far from their dignified canon.
Nobleman’s privilege had turned to furies
In his head,as she struck and struck
At shadows with his dagger,his sword,
Wretched nobody claiming rightful eminence
With his hands,mad to murder
His own torments or throw his life away
On a wager.Genius,on the lam
And on the run,would see him perish
Alone, a friendless dog left to bleed.
The Banquet of Cleopatra, Giambattista Tiepolo, 1746/50
Mesmerised, the assembled guests gaze at Cleopatra,
About to win her wager with Antony
That she could devour ten million sesterces at one meal:
She holds up one of her own pearl earrings,
Poised to dissolve it in vinegar and swallow,
Before the astonished Romans at her table,
A spectacular dénouement to the grand opera.
The whole banqueting hall of the Palazzo Labia
Was frescoed by Tiepolo with the life of Cleopatra,
The great seductress and extravagant heroine
Of the Venetians,squandering their wealth
With abandon.So had the Labia,distinguished
Neither in politics nor war,achieved renown
By profligacy,commanding the golden plates
Of their dinner guests to be thrown out of the window
Into the canal when their banquet was over.
Watching the scene, Tiepolo has depicted himself
And Girolamo Mengozzi Colonna, an expert in frescoes,
His collaborator on this commission,
Who transformed the hall into an apparition
Of splendour and endless space,by means
Of painted illusions,and phantasmal architectonics.
Howthe Labia delighted in the miraculous game,
Preferring the facsimile of marble to real stone,
And brilliant artifice to stolid representation.
They scorned all solid things as fripperies,
And made each day a carnival for fools.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Friday, January 14, 2011
Uganda
Time,that horned and masked chameleon,
With bulging swivelling round eyes,
Stalks slowly forward till its sticky tongue
Strikes like a lightningbolt...
The dead man’s spirit lives on in his jawbone.
He moves through the long grass
Like a leopard.
His smile is wrapped in a red barkcloth shroud.
One twin is human, the other a python.
Their voices are waterfalls.
West through the forest,crossing two streams,
I go,emerging at the swamp
Of sitatunga and shoebill,
Then climb the hill to the shrine.
In the rainforest the chimpanzees are at war:
One tribe methodically exterminating the other,
Isolating and murdering the enemy
One by one.
With bulging swivelling round eyes,
Stalks slowly forward till its sticky tongue
Strikes like a lightningbolt...
The dead man’s spirit lives on in his jawbone.
He moves through the long grass
Like a leopard.
His smile is wrapped in a red barkcloth shroud.
One twin is human, the other a python.
Their voices are waterfalls.
West through the forest,crossing two streams,
I go,emerging at the swamp
Of sitatunga and shoebill,
Then climb the hill to the shrine.
In the rainforest the chimpanzees are at war:
One tribe methodically exterminating the other,
Isolating and murdering the enemy
One by one.
The Man in the Panama Hat
My mind:
Basilisk lizard running
Across water
With paddle feet.
All things are always and everywhere
Getting worse
In the most exquisite ways.
Like that wily Mayan
Who,questioned by Columbus
As to the whereabouts of the golden cities,
Pointed eastwards away from his homeland,
I will always send the world the other way.
A chieftain climbing the mountains
To search for golden frogs,
I pull down the clouds with my fingers,
Name every new thing I see.
My Scottish empire
Disappears in the jungle,
Overgrown,
Bitten to death.
An orchid’s flame
Will not save you
Though you try to cup it in your hands.
Basilisk lizard running
Across water
With paddle feet.
All things are always and everywhere
Getting worse
In the most exquisite ways.
Like that wily Mayan
Who,questioned by Columbus
As to the whereabouts of the golden cities,
Pointed eastwards away from his homeland,
I will always send the world the other way.
A chieftain climbing the mountains
To search for golden frogs,
I pull down the clouds with my fingers,
Name every new thing I see.
My Scottish empire
Disappears in the jungle,
Overgrown,
Bitten to death.
An orchid’s flame
Will not save you
Though you try to cup it in your hands.
The Rivals
Florence, 1504-1508
A wily operator,Piero Soderini,
Who matched two heavyweight champions,
In the Great Council Hall’s ring,
Michelangelo the broken-nosed slugger,
The crowd’s new favourite,
And Leonardo,prancing jabbing fop,
Hated and adored in equal parts.
Through long still nights,Leonardo,
Muttered over his notebooks,encoding
The world with a bastard’s will,
While Michelangelo ,holding his chisel
Like an assassin’s dagger,circled
His sculpture,choosing his next attack.
Brutal in their mutual vendetta,
They raged ,schemed,insulted each other,
Desperate to win the crown
And cast the enemy like a rebel angel
Down into the Bottomless Pit.
First Leonardo,then his younger rival
The Gonfalier commissioned, their contest
Meant to serve the glory of Florence.
At opposite ends of the Great Hall
Each would paint a giant mural:
Leonardo The Battle of Anghiari,
Michelangelo The Battle of Cascina.
This would be the grandest room on earth,
The heroic city’s greatest boast,
The school of supreme art.
In capes and gowns of pink and purple
Flouting the day’s dark fashions,
Cardinal of his own heretical Church,
Leonardo walks the same streets
Where Buonarroti,surly and dishevelled,
Black hair over a clenched frown,
Bowls along in scruffy slept-in clothes,
Like a murderer fleeing his crime.
Monstrous ruck of men and horses,
Knotting,clashing,twisting,stabbing:
The pen’s spearpoint jabs and parries,
Swings across the paper,raising
A dustcloud of blood,dirt,dreams.
Slowly,so slowly the work progresses,
In Leonardo’s studio at Santa Maria Novella,
As other fascinations constantly
Pull him away for hours, days,weeks.
Bent over a vast battlefield of paper
In the Hospital of the Dyers,Michelangelo-
Greek fire fuelling his bathhouse fever-
Etches young men’s sinews and nerves,
Superb flesh about to be ravaged
In its final humiliation.Audacity has him
By the balls:risk the soul on his hand’s
Work is all he can do to live,breathe,
Self-martyred ,broken into ecstasy.
In the Great Hall young Raphael
Walks from one end to the other,
Sketching the opposing cartoons,
His soul divided by their splendours,
Resolved to reconcile such extremes
With grace;inwardly he transmutes
This titanic game of thrusts and feints,
And steals their powers for himself.
A wily operator,Piero Soderini,
Who matched two heavyweight champions,
In the Great Council Hall’s ring,
Michelangelo the broken-nosed slugger,
The crowd’s new favourite,
And Leonardo,prancing jabbing fop,
Hated and adored in equal parts.
Through long still nights,Leonardo,
Muttered over his notebooks,encoding
The world with a bastard’s will,
While Michelangelo ,holding his chisel
Like an assassin’s dagger,circled
His sculpture,choosing his next attack.
Brutal in their mutual vendetta,
They raged ,schemed,insulted each other,
Desperate to win the crown
And cast the enemy like a rebel angel
Down into the Bottomless Pit.
First Leonardo,then his younger rival
The Gonfalier commissioned, their contest
Meant to serve the glory of Florence.
At opposite ends of the Great Hall
Each would paint a giant mural:
Leonardo The Battle of Anghiari,
Michelangelo The Battle of Cascina.
This would be the grandest room on earth,
The heroic city’s greatest boast,
The school of supreme art.
In capes and gowns of pink and purple
Flouting the day’s dark fashions,
Cardinal of his own heretical Church,
Leonardo walks the same streets
Where Buonarroti,surly and dishevelled,
Black hair over a clenched frown,
Bowls along in scruffy slept-in clothes,
Like a murderer fleeing his crime.
Monstrous ruck of men and horses,
Knotting,clashing,twisting,stabbing:
The pen’s spearpoint jabs and parries,
Swings across the paper,raising
A dustcloud of blood,dirt,dreams.
Slowly,so slowly the work progresses,
In Leonardo’s studio at Santa Maria Novella,
As other fascinations constantly
Pull him away for hours, days,weeks.
Bent over a vast battlefield of paper
In the Hospital of the Dyers,Michelangelo-
Greek fire fuelling his bathhouse fever-
Etches young men’s sinews and nerves,
Superb flesh about to be ravaged
In its final humiliation.Audacity has him
By the balls:risk the soul on his hand’s
Work is all he can do to live,breathe,
Self-martyred ,broken into ecstasy.
In the Great Hall young Raphael
Walks from one end to the other,
Sketching the opposing cartoons,
His soul divided by their splendours,
Resolved to reconcile such extremes
With grace;inwardly he transmutes
This titanic game of thrusts and feints,
And steals their powers for himself.
Monday, January 03, 2011
Feedback
Polysemous eyes
of the loved one-
we live in all the senses
a volatile cosmos
changing from moment
to moment
Oblivion sirens
the cracked people
waiting for a saviour
in a country never seen
on any map
Moss takes hold
on the temple ruins
the clock on the mantelpiece
stutters to standstill
The sun comes up again
saluted with a shrug
of the loved one-
we live in all the senses
a volatile cosmos
changing from moment
to moment
Oblivion sirens
the cracked people
waiting for a saviour
in a country never seen
on any map
Moss takes hold
on the temple ruins
the clock on the mantelpiece
stutters to standstill
The sun comes up again
saluted with a shrug
Hitler's Books
Pencil in hand, he scans the page
For something he can use,
Underlining a passage here, a phrase there,
Inserting exclamations or question marks,
Plundering ideas to fit his mission.
Each day at breakfast, the Fuhrer reprises
Last night’s reading at tedious length
To all at his table, recalling complete passages
From various books, discussing the topics
To fix them in his own mind.
1925.He opens his sketchbook
And draws a detailed stage set for the first act
Of Julius Caesar, with ominous facades
For the Forum where the hero will die.
We will meet again at Philippi,
He warns opponents with a glower.
For something he can use,
Underlining a passage here, a phrase there,
Inserting exclamations or question marks,
Plundering ideas to fit his mission.
Each day at breakfast, the Fuhrer reprises
Last night’s reading at tedious length
To all at his table, recalling complete passages
From various books, discussing the topics
To fix them in his own mind.
1925.He opens his sketchbook
And draws a detailed stage set for the first act
Of Julius Caesar, with ominous facades
For the Forum where the hero will die.
We will meet again at Philippi,
He warns opponents with a glower.
Remembering Some Lines From A Favourite Poet
A phrase here, a line there
Toll their privilege through me;
Properties of the moment
Reverberate with love.
The secret signs return
In various guises,
The old enchantment
Still telling the rosary
Of my blood.
To please and bewilder
Is the poem’s heft;
A foreign self becomes
As one’s own heartbeat.
Everything is there and gone,
Flitting in and out of sight,
Too rich and exquisite
To exist for more than a second.
From these fires you flee
And to them you return,
Endebted to their cold burning.
Toll their privilege through me;
Properties of the moment
Reverberate with love.
The secret signs return
In various guises,
The old enchantment
Still telling the rosary
Of my blood.
To please and bewilder
Is the poem’s heft;
A foreign self becomes
As one’s own heartbeat.
Everything is there and gone,
Flitting in and out of sight,
Too rich and exquisite
To exist for more than a second.
From these fires you flee
And to them you return,
Endebted to their cold burning.
137
A colleague who met me strolling rather aimlessly in the beautiful streets of Copenhagen said to me in a friendly manner, “You look very unhappy,” whereupon I answered angrily, “How can one look happy when he is thinking about the anomalous Zeeman effect?”
Wolfgang Pauli
Mephistopheles the mathematician
Smiles a sardonic smile.
The veiled woman on the staircase
Sings with perfect guile.
And everywhere the numbers
Turn somersaults all the while.
There are thirty-two paths of wisdom,
Of which I have stumbled on
Perhaps one or two, no more.
The more precisely one knows the energy
Of a spectral line ignited when an electron jumps
From a higher to a lower orbit within an atom,
The less precisely can you measure
The time the action takes.
The dreams and mandalas of physics,
The Buddhist sutras of everyday life,
Drive me deeper and deeper
Into mathematics.
Invented or discovered, the world
Holds me to uncanny bargains.
No matter how old I grow
I shall always be afraid.
From three to four is the difficult transition.
Symmetries and harmonies beyond comprehension
Madden my straining intellect.
Every theory contains its own heresy.
The weak links teach more than the strong.
From circles to ellipses my mind runs.
The trembling thrust of planetary motions
I sense in each line I write.
Can it be that God is left-handed?
Dogs and foxes bite me in my sleep.
A Chinese woman hands me a bowl of noodles
With a weird little smile.
Wolfgang Pauli
Mephistopheles the mathematician
Smiles a sardonic smile.
The veiled woman on the staircase
Sings with perfect guile.
And everywhere the numbers
Turn somersaults all the while.
There are thirty-two paths of wisdom,
Of which I have stumbled on
Perhaps one or two, no more.
The more precisely one knows the energy
Of a spectral line ignited when an electron jumps
From a higher to a lower orbit within an atom,
The less precisely can you measure
The time the action takes.
The dreams and mandalas of physics,
The Buddhist sutras of everyday life,
Drive me deeper and deeper
Into mathematics.
Invented or discovered, the world
Holds me to uncanny bargains.
No matter how old I grow
I shall always be afraid.
From three to four is the difficult transition.
Symmetries and harmonies beyond comprehension
Madden my straining intellect.
Every theory contains its own heresy.
The weak links teach more than the strong.
From circles to ellipses my mind runs.
The trembling thrust of planetary motions
I sense in each line I write.
Can it be that God is left-handed?
Dogs and foxes bite me in my sleep.
A Chinese woman hands me a bowl of noodles
With a weird little smile.
Six Perfect Sentences
That was the year when Hemingway wrote six perfect sentences.
The year when Ulysses was published.
The year the California grizzly bear became extinct
And the last Barbary lion was killed in Morocco.
The Soviet Union was founded;
The Ottoman Empire was abolished.
The first men in three thousand years
Entered the tomb of Tutankhamun.
Mussolini and his Blackshirts marched on Rome,
While, in Paris, Gurdjieff opened his Institute
For the Harmonious Development of Man.
Michael Collins fell in an ambush in West Cork.
Walter Rathenau was assassinated in Berlin.
The Turks massacred the Greeks in Smyrna.
A twenty-ton meteorite landed in Virginia.
Mohandas Gandhi was sentenced to prison
For “sedition against the British Crown.”
And Hemingway managed six perfect lines.
The year when Ulysses was published.
The year the California grizzly bear became extinct
And the last Barbary lion was killed in Morocco.
The Soviet Union was founded;
The Ottoman Empire was abolished.
The first men in three thousand years
Entered the tomb of Tutankhamun.
Mussolini and his Blackshirts marched on Rome,
While, in Paris, Gurdjieff opened his Institute
For the Harmonious Development of Man.
Michael Collins fell in an ambush in West Cork.
Walter Rathenau was assassinated in Berlin.
The Turks massacred the Greeks in Smyrna.
A twenty-ton meteorite landed in Virginia.
Mohandas Gandhi was sentenced to prison
For “sedition against the British Crown.”
And Hemingway managed six perfect lines.
Chess Moves
Accumulation of advantages is my game,
The delight of asymmetry,of annihilation,
With bayonet attacks,blockades and breakthroughs,
Zugzwang and zwischenzug,
The unseen mate and the vanished centre.
What will it be? The Berlin defence
Or the Calabrian counter-gambit?
The Dragon variation or the Lasker trap?
Perhaps I shall introduce the Java theme,
Practise decoys and distant opposition,
Or proffer Greek gifts and poisoned pawns.
Do not be surprised to face the Fegatello attack
Orthe cunning use of outposts and holes;
See-saws,star checks,staircase movements,
All can be brought to bear.
One revels in trebuchets,mirror mates,excelsiors,
The timely use of bad bishops and bare kings,
Passar battaglia and the pendulum draw.
At the siege of Sebastopol,Prince Sergei Urusov,
One of Europe’s finest players,proposed
To settle possession of a long-contested trench
By a game of chess against a worthy opponent,
The best player in the English army.
His general,alas,dismissed the idea
And ordered the next costly attack.
Alexandre Deschapelles joined Napoleon’s army,
Was left for dead at the siege of Mainz,
Fought again at Fleurus,was captured at Baylen,
Made a clever escape from Cadiz,
Lost his right hand and earned a sabre scar
From brow to chin.One of the first men
To be awarded the Cross of Honour.
He tore it off in disgust when Napoleon
Had himself crowned Emperor.
After Waterloo he earned a living
Playing chess at the Cafe de la Regence,
Boasting he had learned all the secrets of the game
In just three days.Delicate and irritable,
A slow meticulous player,he took on Bourdonnais
As pupil,his opposite,hale and cheerful
And a swift decisive master at the board.
Once he had lost to his talented disciple,
Deschapelles gave up chess altogether
And made his fortune at whist instead.
He retired to a pleasant villa
And,when not tending the orchards,
Frequently fought one-armed duels,
His prickly self-regard all too easily provoked.
His last years he spent writing bizarre constitutions
For various South American republics.
Saint Amant said of him:”The only way
To remain on good terms with him
Without meanness or flattery
Is to see him seldom,never to be in his debt,
And to maintain a dignified reserve.”
Now for some sly triangulation,
The accelerated dragon and the use of desperados,
Sitzfleisch or Santasiere’s Folly.
Let us commence with the Orang Utan opening...
Very soon I shall hold you in perpetual check.
The delight of asymmetry,of annihilation,
With bayonet attacks,blockades and breakthroughs,
Zugzwang and zwischenzug,
The unseen mate and the vanished centre.
What will it be? The Berlin defence
Or the Calabrian counter-gambit?
The Dragon variation or the Lasker trap?
Perhaps I shall introduce the Java theme,
Practise decoys and distant opposition,
Or proffer Greek gifts and poisoned pawns.
Do not be surprised to face the Fegatello attack
Orthe cunning use of outposts and holes;
See-saws,star checks,staircase movements,
All can be brought to bear.
One revels in trebuchets,mirror mates,excelsiors,
The timely use of bad bishops and bare kings,
Passar battaglia and the pendulum draw.
At the siege of Sebastopol,Prince Sergei Urusov,
One of Europe’s finest players,proposed
To settle possession of a long-contested trench
By a game of chess against a worthy opponent,
The best player in the English army.
His general,alas,dismissed the idea
And ordered the next costly attack.
Alexandre Deschapelles joined Napoleon’s army,
Was left for dead at the siege of Mainz,
Fought again at Fleurus,was captured at Baylen,
Made a clever escape from Cadiz,
Lost his right hand and earned a sabre scar
From brow to chin.One of the first men
To be awarded the Cross of Honour.
He tore it off in disgust when Napoleon
Had himself crowned Emperor.
After Waterloo he earned a living
Playing chess at the Cafe de la Regence,
Boasting he had learned all the secrets of the game
In just three days.Delicate and irritable,
A slow meticulous player,he took on Bourdonnais
As pupil,his opposite,hale and cheerful
And a swift decisive master at the board.
Once he had lost to his talented disciple,
Deschapelles gave up chess altogether
And made his fortune at whist instead.
He retired to a pleasant villa
And,when not tending the orchards,
Frequently fought one-armed duels,
His prickly self-regard all too easily provoked.
His last years he spent writing bizarre constitutions
For various South American republics.
Saint Amant said of him:”The only way
To remain on good terms with him
Without meanness or flattery
Is to see him seldom,never to be in his debt,
And to maintain a dignified reserve.”
Now for some sly triangulation,
The accelerated dragon and the use of desperados,
Sitzfleisch or Santasiere’s Folly.
Let us commence with the Orang Utan opening...
Very soon I shall hold you in perpetual check.
The Silk Road
Beyond the Great Wall is nothing.Death.
The barbarous wilderness with its monsters.
The banished who die there,what hell shall befall them!
Demons shall tear them from their graves.
And any Buddhst who perishes on that side
Shall be damned eternally,reborn in the lowliest forms.
Wind-besieged bastion of Jiayuguan,
Last tower looking out on death.
Exiles,passing through the tunnel,
Leave life and hope behind them,
Never to hear their mother tongue again,
Scratching despairing poems and messages
Into the bricks as they go.
Westward to Dunhuang spins the thread.
Once-great cities,teeming,dreaming,building,
Now are vanished into the sand,
Crawled over by lizards and scorpions.
Fabulous mirages visit the wide horizons,
Lakes and rivers misted in their own reflections,
Ghosts of trees and houses hover beyond.
In the Mogao caves of the Mingsha Hills,
Images extrude from the walls,
Vivid in the gloom,-Hindu gymnosophists
Pa,vermilion faces oxidized to black,
White eyes glaring with preternatural fervour.
Frescoed Buddhas and bodhisattvas
Multiply,sanctified by endless reproduction,
Hallucinations of Maya,
Styled into truth by human hands.
Thus one makes one’s way across
The swaying ropebridge of time.
Through shades of barren blue landscape
Northward to Turfan, warehouse of winds,
Where a sand-buried egg will boil in a minute.
Strangely,in this rainless nowhere,
Cold water channels emerge from the ground
And in autumn courtyard trellises sag
With dusky grapes,apricots and lemons.
Uighur oases:all shrewdness and swagger,
The horse-people canter,neigh and capriole,
Lemon-bright eyes and ebullient gestures,
Horses dancing over the sands.
Voluptuous music ripples in veils
And the women dressed in colour-fanfares
Are a torchlight procession in the dark.
Beyond,dead cities shiver in the wind,
Battlements and palaces all rubbed away,
Spires looming stupendous and forlorn.
Compacted earth rasps underfoot,
And perhaps an apparition will silently rise
And show you a lifetime in an instant.
Eight hundred miles to Kashgar:
On one side hazy snowcrests shine like madness,
On the other stretch the Taklamakan sands,
Flood-smoothed stone and gravel glaze,
And here and there a mountain-suckled
Orchard or arable field.
Demons lead travellers astray with noises,
Sandstorms open onto unearthly hush,
Voices and ghosts lull the heart past caring.
There,no,over there,somewhere,near and far,
Comes the hum of a non-existent caravan
And musical instruments ensorcelling
With melodies that are and are not.
Outside Kashgar,in dust by the roadside,
Huddle the graves of Chinese labourers,
Facing east,back towards their motherland.
In the city,the Fragrant Concubine has her tomb,
An Uighur princess given in tribute
To the Chinese emperor,sold into despair.
He,entranced by this beautiful savage,
Ran long-nailed fingers over her skin,
But she drew back,rejecting his desire,
And,fleeing his angry eyes,strangled herself.
The barbarous wilderness with its monsters.
The banished who die there,what hell shall befall them!
Demons shall tear them from their graves.
And any Buddhst who perishes on that side
Shall be damned eternally,reborn in the lowliest forms.
Wind-besieged bastion of Jiayuguan,
Last tower looking out on death.
Exiles,passing through the tunnel,
Leave life and hope behind them,
Never to hear their mother tongue again,
Scratching despairing poems and messages
Into the bricks as they go.
Westward to Dunhuang spins the thread.
Once-great cities,teeming,dreaming,building,
Now are vanished into the sand,
Crawled over by lizards and scorpions.
Fabulous mirages visit the wide horizons,
Lakes and rivers misted in their own reflections,
Ghosts of trees and houses hover beyond.
In the Mogao caves of the Mingsha Hills,
Images extrude from the walls,
Vivid in the gloom,-Hindu gymnosophists
Pa,vermilion faces oxidized to black,
White eyes glaring with preternatural fervour.
Frescoed Buddhas and bodhisattvas
Multiply,sanctified by endless reproduction,
Hallucinations of Maya,
Styled into truth by human hands.
Thus one makes one’s way across
The swaying ropebridge of time.
Through shades of barren blue landscape
Northward to Turfan, warehouse of winds,
Where a sand-buried egg will boil in a minute.
Strangely,in this rainless nowhere,
Cold water channels emerge from the ground
And in autumn courtyard trellises sag
With dusky grapes,apricots and lemons.
Uighur oases:all shrewdness and swagger,
The horse-people canter,neigh and capriole,
Lemon-bright eyes and ebullient gestures,
Horses dancing over the sands.
Voluptuous music ripples in veils
And the women dressed in colour-fanfares
Are a torchlight procession in the dark.
Beyond,dead cities shiver in the wind,
Battlements and palaces all rubbed away,
Spires looming stupendous and forlorn.
Compacted earth rasps underfoot,
And perhaps an apparition will silently rise
And show you a lifetime in an instant.
Eight hundred miles to Kashgar:
On one side hazy snowcrests shine like madness,
On the other stretch the Taklamakan sands,
Flood-smoothed stone and gravel glaze,
And here and there a mountain-suckled
Orchard or arable field.
Demons lead travellers astray with noises,
Sandstorms open onto unearthly hush,
Voices and ghosts lull the heart past caring.
There,no,over there,somewhere,near and far,
Comes the hum of a non-existent caravan
And musical instruments ensorcelling
With melodies that are and are not.
Outside Kashgar,in dust by the roadside,
Huddle the graves of Chinese labourers,
Facing east,back towards their motherland.
In the city,the Fragrant Concubine has her tomb,
An Uighur princess given in tribute
To the Chinese emperor,sold into despair.
He,entranced by this beautiful savage,
Ran long-nailed fingers over her skin,
But she drew back,rejecting his desire,
And,fleeing his angry eyes,strangled herself.
Polish Communion
This country cannot be found on any map,
Only in the breaking of bread
And the chill grace of vodka;
The borders are shifting, as ever,
And nothing can be held in the hand.
Again it is Maundy Thursday
And the villagers hang effigies of Judas,
Flog them, burn them, throw them in the river.
Woman, sunrise celebrates Mass in your eyes,
Bird calls break the forest silence,
A pillar of fire rises among the trees,
Wild boar guard the musky gloom.
Skulls under skullcaps recite the Psalms.
Drunkenness is my vocation,
Religiously reciting the names
Of different vodkas :
Żubrówka,Tatrazańska, Jarzębiak.
Pierced by the Tartar arrows of the summer sun,
I tumble naked into steaming lakes,
The earth sweats like an Arabian thoroughbred,
This is no land for the rational,the sane,
It belongs to the laughing rascals
Leaning out of windows on Easter Monday
To throw water bombs at passing girls.
Insurrection clamours
In the shipyards of the spirit;
Shanties carry on the wind,
And whale songs echo through sailors’ bones,
While the potbellied knights of King Arthur
Feast in the hall of marble columns,
Fed from the Holy Grail.
In Praski Park,on the Vistula’s edge,
I sit on a smooth glacial boulder,
Looking across at the ghost city’s outline,
Luminous Warsaw,resurrected stone by stone.
I cross the bridge to the Old Town,
The Castle’s pink Renaissance facade in the square,
Where the last king was hustled out by Russian soldiers,
Forbidden to address the silent crowd,
Before him only exile,nostalgia,despair.
The gilded apartments,willed out of nothingness
By desperate magic,glitter with mourning,
The dust of broken centuries swarming in the light.
Chestnut-splendid and besquirrelled,
All paths through Łazienkowski Park lead
To the Palace on the Water,that great swan
Fed on faith and joy,its mutable aspects
Appearing through the willows as you approach.
Inside,the rooms,elaborately dazzling,
Bespeak pavanes on polished marble
And fluttering repartee at butterfly balls,
Lightness and fancy set free for a moment.
In my mundane mediocrity,I envy
The old nobles of Poland, decadent, idle,
Revelling in their imagined Sarmatian descent,
As much as the ideals of Greece and Rome,
Horsemen warriors decked in gold, with Amazon women,
Feasting and living with opulent extravagance,
Wearing fur caps with pearls and crimson damask robes,
Silk and precious stones, with sashes of gold,
The men shaving their heads in imagined imitation
Of the ancient Sarmatian nomads.
Neglecting politics for display,
Karol Radziwiłł would, in a drunken stupor,
Shoot any dinner guest he deemed disagreeable;
For sport, he would also have his servants
Fire huge bison into the air
From massive launchers hidden in the forests
Of his estate, so he could shoots them in mid-air,
A crack shot who seldom missed.
They were the finest men ever,
Jan Sobieski, born in a thunderstorm,
Caparisoned in furs and silks,
Silver half-moon heels on his Turkish boots,
Jewelled scimitar at his side,
And his winged hussars, steel armour
Polished like silver and edged with brass,
Shining like gold,
Their shoulders adorned with mascarons
Depicting the Nemean lion,
Their breastplates graven with the Holy Virgin,
The officers in Sarmatian scale armour,
Leoparskins thrown over their backs,
Tall eagle feathers attached to their backs,
Their Circassian saddles of broidered velvet
Set with precious stones,
Striking terror into every enemy
When they appeared on the horizon,
Pennants fluttering and weapons gleaming....
In the cathedral of Sandomierz
Along the nave the massive paintings
Detail the innumerable martyrdoms
Of faithful Catholics at the hands
Of Muslims and Jews,-here, a Christian child
Is ritually murdered by Jews,
Rolling him in a barrel of nails,
Then letting the blood drain from his body
Then throwing the corpse to the dogs.
Endless beheadings and tortures
Prove the nation righteous,
And a Pole still seated on his horse
Is blown through the air
Across the Vistula, as the castle explodes,
To land uninjured on the other side.
Must the courageous be cruel in their defiance?
Time and again the people have risen
To fight for freedom,whatever the cost,
Knowing that victory is always temporary,
A preparation for the next defeat,
Surviving to work some profound influence
Upon the nations of Europe.
Puszcza Kampinoska:countless trails lead off
Into the deep wilderness...stray too far
And you are lost,lost,lost...who would hear
Your small voice calling? The darkness
Belongs to wolves and boars.In a silent clearing
A monument marks the spot where people
Stood before open ditches to be shot.
The lonely trumpeter of Kraków sounds the hours
From the highest tower of Mariacki Church,
Addressing the four quarters in turn,
Each slow sobbing call cut short in mid-phrase,
Surprised by the Tatar’s fatal arrow.
On Wawel Hill,in the Gothic cathedral,
Straight ahead in the transept ,reflecting
Sun-shafts from golden roof and columns,
Rides the body of St Stanislaw in silver coffin.
Poems fill the air like the palatial Turkish tents
Captured at Vienna,displayed in the castle,
With empty suits of oriental armour standing guard.
Ornamental Italian castles on the northern European plains;
Tiny roads to ancient villages or overgrown ramparts...
Memories roll forward and back,crossing the Obidowa pass
At sunset,ridge on ridge receding through green
And grey to distant blue,the Tatra peaks ever closer...
Nothing but the fire of rowanberry vodka
On this unrepeatable day,in the imagined world
Of destruction and creation,where the soul
Must suffer and grow wise.
Inside the brute red mass of Malbork Castle,
Labyrinthine corridors disappearing into inner darkness,
I gaze into lumps of amber,into the bodies
Of insects and plants suspended in amniotic hell.
Is it there still,inside me,Copernicus’s view
Of the Baltic from Frombork,out at the edge,
Where what appears disappears and appears again?
Only in the breaking of bread
And the chill grace of vodka;
The borders are shifting, as ever,
And nothing can be held in the hand.
Again it is Maundy Thursday
And the villagers hang effigies of Judas,
Flog them, burn them, throw them in the river.
Woman, sunrise celebrates Mass in your eyes,
Bird calls break the forest silence,
A pillar of fire rises among the trees,
Wild boar guard the musky gloom.
Skulls under skullcaps recite the Psalms.
Drunkenness is my vocation,
Religiously reciting the names
Of different vodkas :
Żubrówka,Tatrazańska, Jarzębiak.
Pierced by the Tartar arrows of the summer sun,
I tumble naked into steaming lakes,
The earth sweats like an Arabian thoroughbred,
This is no land for the rational,the sane,
It belongs to the laughing rascals
Leaning out of windows on Easter Monday
To throw water bombs at passing girls.
Insurrection clamours
In the shipyards of the spirit;
Shanties carry on the wind,
And whale songs echo through sailors’ bones,
While the potbellied knights of King Arthur
Feast in the hall of marble columns,
Fed from the Holy Grail.
In Praski Park,on the Vistula’s edge,
I sit on a smooth glacial boulder,
Looking across at the ghost city’s outline,
Luminous Warsaw,resurrected stone by stone.
I cross the bridge to the Old Town,
The Castle’s pink Renaissance facade in the square,
Where the last king was hustled out by Russian soldiers,
Forbidden to address the silent crowd,
Before him only exile,nostalgia,despair.
The gilded apartments,willed out of nothingness
By desperate magic,glitter with mourning,
The dust of broken centuries swarming in the light.
Chestnut-splendid and besquirrelled,
All paths through Łazienkowski Park lead
To the Palace on the Water,that great swan
Fed on faith and joy,its mutable aspects
Appearing through the willows as you approach.
Inside,the rooms,elaborately dazzling,
Bespeak pavanes on polished marble
And fluttering repartee at butterfly balls,
Lightness and fancy set free for a moment.
In my mundane mediocrity,I envy
The old nobles of Poland, decadent, idle,
Revelling in their imagined Sarmatian descent,
As much as the ideals of Greece and Rome,
Horsemen warriors decked in gold, with Amazon women,
Feasting and living with opulent extravagance,
Wearing fur caps with pearls and crimson damask robes,
Silk and precious stones, with sashes of gold,
The men shaving their heads in imagined imitation
Of the ancient Sarmatian nomads.
Neglecting politics for display,
Karol Radziwiłł would, in a drunken stupor,
Shoot any dinner guest he deemed disagreeable;
For sport, he would also have his servants
Fire huge bison into the air
From massive launchers hidden in the forests
Of his estate, so he could shoots them in mid-air,
A crack shot who seldom missed.
They were the finest men ever,
Jan Sobieski, born in a thunderstorm,
Caparisoned in furs and silks,
Silver half-moon heels on his Turkish boots,
Jewelled scimitar at his side,
And his winged hussars, steel armour
Polished like silver and edged with brass,
Shining like gold,
Their shoulders adorned with mascarons
Depicting the Nemean lion,
Their breastplates graven with the Holy Virgin,
The officers in Sarmatian scale armour,
Leoparskins thrown over their backs,
Tall eagle feathers attached to their backs,
Their Circassian saddles of broidered velvet
Set with precious stones,
Striking terror into every enemy
When they appeared on the horizon,
Pennants fluttering and weapons gleaming....
In the cathedral of Sandomierz
Along the nave the massive paintings
Detail the innumerable martyrdoms
Of faithful Catholics at the hands
Of Muslims and Jews,-here, a Christian child
Is ritually murdered by Jews,
Rolling him in a barrel of nails,
Then letting the blood drain from his body
Then throwing the corpse to the dogs.
Endless beheadings and tortures
Prove the nation righteous,
And a Pole still seated on his horse
Is blown through the air
Across the Vistula, as the castle explodes,
To land uninjured on the other side.
Must the courageous be cruel in their defiance?
Time and again the people have risen
To fight for freedom,whatever the cost,
Knowing that victory is always temporary,
A preparation for the next defeat,
Surviving to work some profound influence
Upon the nations of Europe.
Puszcza Kampinoska:countless trails lead off
Into the deep wilderness...stray too far
And you are lost,lost,lost...who would hear
Your small voice calling? The darkness
Belongs to wolves and boars.In a silent clearing
A monument marks the spot where people
Stood before open ditches to be shot.
The lonely trumpeter of Kraków sounds the hours
From the highest tower of Mariacki Church,
Addressing the four quarters in turn,
Each slow sobbing call cut short in mid-phrase,
Surprised by the Tatar’s fatal arrow.
On Wawel Hill,in the Gothic cathedral,
Straight ahead in the transept ,reflecting
Sun-shafts from golden roof and columns,
Rides the body of St Stanislaw in silver coffin.
Poems fill the air like the palatial Turkish tents
Captured at Vienna,displayed in the castle,
With empty suits of oriental armour standing guard.
Ornamental Italian castles on the northern European plains;
Tiny roads to ancient villages or overgrown ramparts...
Memories roll forward and back,crossing the Obidowa pass
At sunset,ridge on ridge receding through green
And grey to distant blue,the Tatra peaks ever closer...
Nothing but the fire of rowanberry vodka
On this unrepeatable day,in the imagined world
Of destruction and creation,where the soul
Must suffer and grow wise.
Inside the brute red mass of Malbork Castle,
Labyrinthine corridors disappearing into inner darkness,
I gaze into lumps of amber,into the bodies
Of insects and plants suspended in amniotic hell.
Is it there still,inside me,Copernicus’s view
Of the Baltic from Frombork,out at the edge,
Where what appears disappears and appears again?
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Waltzing the Danube
Staring out of a train window
As it hurtles through the countryside,
One knows that life eludes all taxonomies
Can never be reduced to diagrams.
You raise your face to the breeze,
Life’s essence passes through you
And seeps into the bones.
Where is the river’s source?
Is it on Mt Abnoba?In Hesperia?
In the land of the Hyperboreans?
This is the zone of hybrids and metamorphoses.
In a small dip in the hillside the Breg
Bubbles up from underground;the meadow
Is steeped in water,sodden and flooded
By countless rivulets...
Once the primeval Danube flowed
Into the Gulf of Thetis,into the Sarmatic Sea,
Its mouth where Vienna now stands.
In the Clock Museum at Furtwanger,
Timepieces by the thousand tick off the hours
In a dream of perpetual motion,pendulums
And cogwheels dividing eternity
Into mathematical units,while life
Flies up and down and in and out
And all around...The relief of science,
Distracting us from our inner torment,
Turning our gaze to the world outside!
Perhaps ths way we will keep our heads,
Discover a world secure and structured,
A home for the self-tormented spirit.
Stations I pass through,words I write...
The struggle to fill in the blank spaces,
Annul the nullity, escape from insignificance...
Why did it all turn out as it did-myself
And the world-from the beginning till now?
Keep moving bravely forward,do not rest.
The mystery of the Hapsburg Empire
Draws me in,through paradox and oxymoron,
The irreconcilable contradiction,the puzzle
Never to be solved,too many pieces missing,
The synthesis that cannot be achieved.
This is my future,forever postponed,
My mind,like a Klein bottle.
Must one believe in God to have faith in the world?
Very early I began to doubt priests’ words
And see in their rites mere theatre.
One must love the created world,all the same,
Be it underwritten by the heavens
Or by ourselves alone.
The Danube is, with no need of affirmation,
Promising nothing,flowing on, oblivious;
I will bridge and ford it however I can,
Accept my destiny as the seasons determine.
A parasite on the hide of Europe,
A parasite feeding on the ideas and emotions
Of the living and the dead,I mime a life
Inside a carapace of rhetoric.
Am I Roman or barbarian? I am drawn
To the empire’s crumbled stone frontier,
Dividing and defining all the way to the Black Sea.
In Ulm, the sparrow’s nest,the shrine
Of Ahasuerus’s shoe,German law and custom
Bless the sad clerks at their desks,
Their hidden passions distorted by convention,
Rendered pitiful and grotesque.
Close,so close to perdition,I dig into the black roots
Of a language I cannot speak,a culture
Far from my birth,and maunder on,
Sure,at least,of desire’s ordeal,
That binds me to the indescribable beloved,
That face,those hips, those shoulders...
Triple-rivered Passau,floating and flowing
Away on the current,gold and carnation marble
Palaces and churches ,streets winding beneath
Arches,domes and colonnades-a cosmos
Of curves,spheres,circles and ellipses-
The nearest is the furthest away,
The simplest is the most mysterious,
As we seek a home on earth, a hearth
To tend with care and hope,
Discovering grace before nothingness.
Smell of snow in Linz,the hills and river
Heraldic in the still-the imperial AEIOU
Spells infinitely receding possibility
To the heart.To break out
Of this landlocked desolation and reach
The sea!-There we might be happy
As humans, as animals,as gods.
Ochre and orange buildings fade
Into the evening’s watercolour,
In Artstetten Castle crypt,they lie,
Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his Sophie,
Their idiocies annulled by martyrdom.
The old Europe died in their arms,
As they died in each other’s,
Pulling the whole world down with them
Into the bottomless wishing well,
Keeping forever their lovers’ secrets
Deadlier than bullets or bombs.
The first blood flowed out onto his blue tunic,
From the sleeve and chest,as his hat
With huge green feathers fell unharmed.
In Vienna’s Cemetery of the Nameless,
Treading over the Danube’s sacrificial victims,
I watch big crows rise on the wing,
Inhale the simple joy of morning.
How hard it is to tell the real from the unreal,
Fact from feeling,life from death.
In the Museum of Medicine,among
Anatomical models sectioned to reveal
The madness of muscles,organs,arteries
And nerves,I stop before a beautiful
Colourless male head,the lips drawn
Into the smile of a kouros,the skull
Exposing,in median sagittal section,
The cerebellum’s tree of life.
A woman with abdominal walls removed
To lay the genital organs open
Lies serenely prone,in a blonde wig,
A necklace round her waxen throat.
Plump white hands of Hungarian princes,
Earthen hands of Slovakian peasants;
Renaissance palaces winged like griffins,
Hovels made from straw and dung;
Only the trees and stones know
The lives that have gone into this soil.
Wave on wave of invasions, superimposed
Upon one another, have steeped
The earth with Eurasian dreams.
Solitude is their birthright,these souls
Abandoned to the horsemen’s plains,
Forever,even in victory,defeated.
In an open-air cafe in Budapest,I spoon
Icecream into my lying mouth,and watch
The Danube run beneath titanic bridges,
To some unseen horizon,which the spirit,
Fed on books and pictures,can reach for
But never,to its anguish,attain.
Powerless in a marginal province,
One hears the muffled cries of lives
Unknown, destinies arbitrated elsewhere.
Sunflowers and maize cover Mohács field,
Wooden statues planted in the ground
To mark the battle,men and horses.
Faces contorted with ferocious agony,
Crosses and crescents opposed;
The day when the olive tree at Pécs
Turned barren,and King Louis II,
Egged on by his nobles,shrugged
And gave the accursed order for battle.
Like Gaius Scribonius,unwilling
To advance his army into the dark forests
On the other shore,clinging to the pure
And noble Latin tongue as his shield,
I plot strategic victories of speech.
In Bulgaria,-no man’s land of heretics,
Among late nations half-mapped
By Western arrogance,where the dark
Vowels of Old Church Slavonic swung
Their bronze bells in high towers,-
I spy on a church wall an anathema
Against the Bogomils,the peasants’ friends,
Who denounced the satanic princes
Of the earth, its irredeemable evil
Perpetuated through human lust.
Forward the Thracian horseman
Charges,serene in the face of death,
Cloak-wings flying out in the wind.
At the gibbeted crossroads,in the path
Of evil,Romania lures me in where many
Gods have been created then sacrificed.
Only the most fallen, the most corrupt
Can long so for redemption,-
The swarming world,condemned
By sensual delusion,staggers
Under its own desire’s burden.
The delta ravels its secrets before me:
Stream on stream,ramified rivulets
Feeding the great dissolution,
The terminus of death and rebirth.
Nature’s bass note booms through me,
Amid the vast jungle of land and water
Merged,the cavernous shadows
Of overhanging trees, the deep bays
Where time moors,like the Argo returning.
Loosen,release,abandon to the flow!-
Gulls and herons crowd the evening air,
Shouting madly to the sea’s horizon.
As it hurtles through the countryside,
One knows that life eludes all taxonomies
Can never be reduced to diagrams.
You raise your face to the breeze,
Life’s essence passes through you
And seeps into the bones.
Where is the river’s source?
Is it on Mt Abnoba?In Hesperia?
In the land of the Hyperboreans?
This is the zone of hybrids and metamorphoses.
In a small dip in the hillside the Breg
Bubbles up from underground;the meadow
Is steeped in water,sodden and flooded
By countless rivulets...
Once the primeval Danube flowed
Into the Gulf of Thetis,into the Sarmatic Sea,
Its mouth where Vienna now stands.
In the Clock Museum at Furtwanger,
Timepieces by the thousand tick off the hours
In a dream of perpetual motion,pendulums
And cogwheels dividing eternity
Into mathematical units,while life
Flies up and down and in and out
And all around...The relief of science,
Distracting us from our inner torment,
Turning our gaze to the world outside!
Perhaps ths way we will keep our heads,
Discover a world secure and structured,
A home for the self-tormented spirit.
Stations I pass through,words I write...
The struggle to fill in the blank spaces,
Annul the nullity, escape from insignificance...
Why did it all turn out as it did-myself
And the world-from the beginning till now?
Keep moving bravely forward,do not rest.
The mystery of the Hapsburg Empire
Draws me in,through paradox and oxymoron,
The irreconcilable contradiction,the puzzle
Never to be solved,too many pieces missing,
The synthesis that cannot be achieved.
This is my future,forever postponed,
My mind,like a Klein bottle.
Must one believe in God to have faith in the world?
Very early I began to doubt priests’ words
And see in their rites mere theatre.
One must love the created world,all the same,
Be it underwritten by the heavens
Or by ourselves alone.
The Danube is, with no need of affirmation,
Promising nothing,flowing on, oblivious;
I will bridge and ford it however I can,
Accept my destiny as the seasons determine.
A parasite on the hide of Europe,
A parasite feeding on the ideas and emotions
Of the living and the dead,I mime a life
Inside a carapace of rhetoric.
Am I Roman or barbarian? I am drawn
To the empire’s crumbled stone frontier,
Dividing and defining all the way to the Black Sea.
In Ulm, the sparrow’s nest,the shrine
Of Ahasuerus’s shoe,German law and custom
Bless the sad clerks at their desks,
Their hidden passions distorted by convention,
Rendered pitiful and grotesque.
Close,so close to perdition,I dig into the black roots
Of a language I cannot speak,a culture
Far from my birth,and maunder on,
Sure,at least,of desire’s ordeal,
That binds me to the indescribable beloved,
That face,those hips, those shoulders...
Triple-rivered Passau,floating and flowing
Away on the current,gold and carnation marble
Palaces and churches ,streets winding beneath
Arches,domes and colonnades-a cosmos
Of curves,spheres,circles and ellipses-
The nearest is the furthest away,
The simplest is the most mysterious,
As we seek a home on earth, a hearth
To tend with care and hope,
Discovering grace before nothingness.
Smell of snow in Linz,the hills and river
Heraldic in the still-the imperial AEIOU
Spells infinitely receding possibility
To the heart.To break out
Of this landlocked desolation and reach
The sea!-There we might be happy
As humans, as animals,as gods.
Ochre and orange buildings fade
Into the evening’s watercolour,
In Artstetten Castle crypt,they lie,
Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his Sophie,
Their idiocies annulled by martyrdom.
The old Europe died in their arms,
As they died in each other’s,
Pulling the whole world down with them
Into the bottomless wishing well,
Keeping forever their lovers’ secrets
Deadlier than bullets or bombs.
The first blood flowed out onto his blue tunic,
From the sleeve and chest,as his hat
With huge green feathers fell unharmed.
In Vienna’s Cemetery of the Nameless,
Treading over the Danube’s sacrificial victims,
I watch big crows rise on the wing,
Inhale the simple joy of morning.
How hard it is to tell the real from the unreal,
Fact from feeling,life from death.
In the Museum of Medicine,among
Anatomical models sectioned to reveal
The madness of muscles,organs,arteries
And nerves,I stop before a beautiful
Colourless male head,the lips drawn
Into the smile of a kouros,the skull
Exposing,in median sagittal section,
The cerebellum’s tree of life.
A woman with abdominal walls removed
To lay the genital organs open
Lies serenely prone,in a blonde wig,
A necklace round her waxen throat.
Plump white hands of Hungarian princes,
Earthen hands of Slovakian peasants;
Renaissance palaces winged like griffins,
Hovels made from straw and dung;
Only the trees and stones know
The lives that have gone into this soil.
Wave on wave of invasions, superimposed
Upon one another, have steeped
The earth with Eurasian dreams.
Solitude is their birthright,these souls
Abandoned to the horsemen’s plains,
Forever,even in victory,defeated.
In an open-air cafe in Budapest,I spoon
Icecream into my lying mouth,and watch
The Danube run beneath titanic bridges,
To some unseen horizon,which the spirit,
Fed on books and pictures,can reach for
But never,to its anguish,attain.
Powerless in a marginal province,
One hears the muffled cries of lives
Unknown, destinies arbitrated elsewhere.
Sunflowers and maize cover Mohács field,
Wooden statues planted in the ground
To mark the battle,men and horses.
Faces contorted with ferocious agony,
Crosses and crescents opposed;
The day when the olive tree at Pécs
Turned barren,and King Louis II,
Egged on by his nobles,shrugged
And gave the accursed order for battle.
Like Gaius Scribonius,unwilling
To advance his army into the dark forests
On the other shore,clinging to the pure
And noble Latin tongue as his shield,
I plot strategic victories of speech.
In Bulgaria,-no man’s land of heretics,
Among late nations half-mapped
By Western arrogance,where the dark
Vowels of Old Church Slavonic swung
Their bronze bells in high towers,-
I spy on a church wall an anathema
Against the Bogomils,the peasants’ friends,
Who denounced the satanic princes
Of the earth, its irredeemable evil
Perpetuated through human lust.
Forward the Thracian horseman
Charges,serene in the face of death,
Cloak-wings flying out in the wind.
At the gibbeted crossroads,in the path
Of evil,Romania lures me in where many
Gods have been created then sacrificed.
Only the most fallen, the most corrupt
Can long so for redemption,-
The swarming world,condemned
By sensual delusion,staggers
Under its own desire’s burden.
The delta ravels its secrets before me:
Stream on stream,ramified rivulets
Feeding the great dissolution,
The terminus of death and rebirth.
Nature’s bass note booms through me,
Amid the vast jungle of land and water
Merged,the cavernous shadows
Of overhanging trees, the deep bays
Where time moors,like the Argo returning.
Loosen,release,abandon to the flow!-
Gulls and herons crowd the evening air,
Shouting madly to the sea’s horizon.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Mesopotamia
Between two rivers, between drought and flood,
Alluvial civilisation accretes.
Mudtowns obliterated by disaster:
The wind piles sand against their ruins,
Filling in their streets,while the rain
Smooths forlorn heaps into mammary mounds.
Ur lies in ruins,its people dispersed,
Wife abandoned,daughter abandoned,
Walls broken,houses burnt down,
The dead like potsherds scattered
And turning to sand.
In Uruk,home of Anu and Inanna,
Temple cone-mosaic facades
Gleam red,white and black in the glare.
Hunched Sumerian scribes etch pictograms
Into clay tablets,agglutinative thought
Made flesh.They are heaven’s liege-men
On this flat disc surrounded by mountains,
Floating ensphered on a sweetwater ocean,
The terrifying Netherworld groaning below.
Here,where a sudden blinding cloudburst
Turns dusty plain to malebolge,
And a sandstorm candevastate the brightest day,
What should men do but placate the gods
And labour to win their goodwill?
To the gods the ziggurats extend
An invitation to descend;men they command
To shed their shells and ascend.
The temple doors are opened:
The gods gilded statue shines forth
In the shrine’s semi-darkness,
Washed,anointed,perfumed,dressed and fed,
Incense and flowers at his feet.
The air vibrates with music and incantation,
Bread,cakes,butter,fruit and honey on the altar,
The smoke of roasting flesh commingled
With cedarwood and cypress fumes.
Whisper the prayer through a reed tube
In Sumerian into the bull’s right ear,
In Akkadian into the left.
The king lives in harmony.His palace is harmonious,
The sun-gloried courtyard paved with gypsum slabs,
And,inside,the long proud flight of steps
To the throne-room, to the dais
Where His Majesty sits,
His justice as simple as a handful of flour and dates.
In the narrow dusty rubbish-clogged streets,
Pedlars and shoppers walk in the walls’ shade
And a crowd gathers at the crossroads
To hear a storyteller recite “Gilgamesh”.
Ashurnasirpal, King of Assyria,
No pity,no piety in his beaked image,
The straight-staring eyes of total power,
Proclaims: “I built a pillar and covered it
With the skins of rebellious chiefs I had flayed.
Some I walled up inside the pillar,
Some I impaled upon the pillar.
Others I had bound to stakes around it.”
Returning in triumph from campaigns of conquest,
He brings with him strange beasts in cages
And unknown seeds to plant in his gardens.
At Nineveh the omens are reported;
Mathematicians and astronomers plot the heavens
And some already wake from horrible dreams,
Having witnessed the seat of the gods in flames.
In Babylon the New Year’s Festival commences.
A priest unlocks the Temple gate,
Opening the courtyard for prayer.
Purify the precinct with Tigris water,
Smear the walls with cedar resin.
The ceremonial slaughterer with dripping hands
Casts the decapitated sheep into the river
And the old year’s sins are carried away.
The penitent king surrenders his insignia,
The priest strikes his cheek and he bows to the god,
“I did not sin, I protected Babylon.
Neither did I neglect the rites
Or punish without reason.”
Then he rises,purged and blessed,
And once more puts authority on,
Heaven’s chosen Lord of Men.
Alluvial civilisation accretes.
Mudtowns obliterated by disaster:
The wind piles sand against their ruins,
Filling in their streets,while the rain
Smooths forlorn heaps into mammary mounds.
Ur lies in ruins,its people dispersed,
Wife abandoned,daughter abandoned,
Walls broken,houses burnt down,
The dead like potsherds scattered
And turning to sand.
In Uruk,home of Anu and Inanna,
Temple cone-mosaic facades
Gleam red,white and black in the glare.
Hunched Sumerian scribes etch pictograms
Into clay tablets,agglutinative thought
Made flesh.They are heaven’s liege-men
On this flat disc surrounded by mountains,
Floating ensphered on a sweetwater ocean,
The terrifying Netherworld groaning below.
Here,where a sudden blinding cloudburst
Turns dusty plain to malebolge,
And a sandstorm candevastate the brightest day,
What should men do but placate the gods
And labour to win their goodwill?
To the gods the ziggurats extend
An invitation to descend;men they command
To shed their shells and ascend.
The temple doors are opened:
The gods gilded statue shines forth
In the shrine’s semi-darkness,
Washed,anointed,perfumed,dressed and fed,
Incense and flowers at his feet.
The air vibrates with music and incantation,
Bread,cakes,butter,fruit and honey on the altar,
The smoke of roasting flesh commingled
With cedarwood and cypress fumes.
Whisper the prayer through a reed tube
In Sumerian into the bull’s right ear,
In Akkadian into the left.
The king lives in harmony.His palace is harmonious,
The sun-gloried courtyard paved with gypsum slabs,
And,inside,the long proud flight of steps
To the throne-room, to the dais
Where His Majesty sits,
His justice as simple as a handful of flour and dates.
In the narrow dusty rubbish-clogged streets,
Pedlars and shoppers walk in the walls’ shade
And a crowd gathers at the crossroads
To hear a storyteller recite “Gilgamesh”.
Ashurnasirpal, King of Assyria,
No pity,no piety in his beaked image,
The straight-staring eyes of total power,
Proclaims: “I built a pillar and covered it
With the skins of rebellious chiefs I had flayed.
Some I walled up inside the pillar,
Some I impaled upon the pillar.
Others I had bound to stakes around it.”
Returning in triumph from campaigns of conquest,
He brings with him strange beasts in cages
And unknown seeds to plant in his gardens.
At Nineveh the omens are reported;
Mathematicians and astronomers plot the heavens
And some already wake from horrible dreams,
Having witnessed the seat of the gods in flames.
In Babylon the New Year’s Festival commences.
A priest unlocks the Temple gate,
Opening the courtyard for prayer.
Purify the precinct with Tigris water,
Smear the walls with cedar resin.
The ceremonial slaughterer with dripping hands
Casts the decapitated sheep into the river
And the old year’s sins are carried away.
The penitent king surrenders his insignia,
The priest strikes his cheek and he bows to the god,
“I did not sin, I protected Babylon.
Neither did I neglect the rites
Or punish without reason.”
Then he rises,purged and blessed,
And once more puts authority on,
Heaven’s chosen Lord of Men.
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