He may have come from Bohemia,or Silesia, or Bavaria,
Or Italy,even. Was he Swiss, Ukrainian, or Polish?
Gradually, he became a country of his own,
As weird and influential as the moon.
He belonged to the periphery,
To the streets of Lviv,
His face the face of everyone in the crowd,
The preachers,scoundrels,criminals,craftsmen,,
Heretics, spies,lotharios and plain decent folk.
The deviants of the north and south.
Might he have been as exteme as any Sarmatian,
Or made himself a Masonic lodge of one?
Nothing is so occult as the self.
He saw angels in Venetian carnival masks,
The beatific smile turning instantly
Into a macabre grin.
Hypertrophied irony was the mountebank in his head.
He had no use for marble
When wood felt so true in his grasp,
A living dying thing,
Convulsive, gesticulating,twisting
Through ellipses and vortices.
Those remote half-heathen provinces of belief
Held him to the grace of sacrilege,
Sarcastically loving, tenderly hating.
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