EKPHRASIS: “NYMPHS FINDING THE HEAD OF ORPHEUS,” JOHN WILLIAM WATERHOUSE, 1901

 

You watch the moon roll one-eyed out

of its cave to search for thieves & drunks

and hear voices a half-mile long fill the woods

with moonglades and longing with Maenads

and frenzies sweating light like fog onto a river

that’s just a long suture sewn with snags to pull

it tight beneath the mast on which a muse

will mount your throbbing severed head

so you can sing the low rain-fiddle of loss,

empty shirt beaten on the rocks until the rocks

themselves are worn away, and the moon

never blinks not even once, wary and grim

and a little disappointed perhaps to catch you,

tender in your sleeves, too shy to stare back

for long with your two good eyes your one

good tune, little worm of wistful, little well

of inklings, last word in a litany of tongues

with which to sing yourself to sleep,

nobody crooning with nobody’s voice

a lullaby that no one else can hear.

 

EKPHRASIS 8: “BIRDS,” GERHARD RICHTER, 1964

 

This many birds by a river is a sign

of indolence the cats in their kitchens

licking privilege like a paw in praise

of the best and happiest kind of violence

only to a reputation they couldn’t as cats

care less about the bell on each collar

silent as a shiver through the windows

from which they watch the wrens

and this many birds in a field new-plowed

and glowing to itself is fever burning away

terrible things dug deep into fallow fields

of tissue polished by the silver passing shares

of scalpels the birds precise as surgeons

sewing the world to itself with their hunger

then sewing the sky to the world

with the motion of their beginning

to take flight and this many birds

in a dream of flying is just hunger

tugging you up towards the sun

& something is always there flying right

beside you crying out like Daedalus

to warn you about ecstasy & the folly

of your own foolish heart.

 

EKPHRASIS 16: “UNTITLED (EXPULSION),” FRED TOMASELLI, 2000

 

Imagine a man and a woman separated

by divine will from the divine itself

how they stand together in their abstract

trepidation about What Awaits Us Out There

stranded on a horizonless plain of grass and stars

side by side like stones like exceptions in

and of themselves as baroque as any real number

who together exist as Platonic ideals of everything

that limits us to our vulnerable inevitable selves

and say that this day that they’re living is every day

that’s worth living wholly to its end and when

that end comes these two will be nothing more

than clouds of fraught probabilities slashes

in the fabric of a bright black sky statistical

accidents like wind or waves or love their bodies

a kind of Thou and I disguised as light

disguised as enumerations of births and deaths

as blood and nerves as abstract suns as pyres

waiting to be lit in the now and always now

that is all the moments in which they stand

mid-step for the sake of us all afraid

of this life and every other that no one

ever asked them to live.