Per Contra
Summer 2007
Plain Text Version
- Poetry
Ekphrastic Poetry by Donald Kuspit
Albrecht Durer’s Master Engravings,
Melencolia 1, 1514
angel,
the star is your fall
from talismanic
innocence
of grace.
ill at ease
in heaven,
unreconciled
to earth,
you impale
yourself on tools
of thought
and puzzles.
wings of art
do not sustain
flight.
your mind
silty
with perspective,
no free
passage
of feeling.
only the folds
and feathers
of your flesh
are a freely
sensed form,
and they are muffled
by the geometry
of meaning.
the beyond
hangs
like a bat
in the cave
of your
insomnia,
blindly
finding
an inner way
through time.
Knight, Death and Devil, 1513
That simple animal,
the devil,
has become too grotesque
to unmask.
death has the wit
of the foreknown.
these fellow travelers
are mother and father,
no longer
terrorizing.
the dog,
uprooted
from reality,
races
to keep up
with the fantasy.
the shadows
are full
of slow smiles,
the castle
of consciousness
is abandoned.
haunted by death
and the devil,
rebirth is impossible,
reliving
probable.
but there are still
stoic ecstasies,
and the strength
of the self
that recognizes failure.
St. Jerome In His Study, 1514
you turned to scholarship
when the poetry
of your god
became prose.
when the angels
were no longer animals,
it was the only orphic song
they understood.
when you plucked
the phallic thorn
from the lion’s paw,
the poetry
retreated to the invisible
landscape
beyond the light.
your senses
completely stilled
by the stupor
of introspection,
your self-struggle
stilled
by the words
that run
through the hourglass
effortlessly.
still, the sin
of intellectual pride
restores you
to life
of sorts,
ornamental life
of a symbol.
there
but for the grace
of the devil
go i.
Leonardo Da Vinci’s
Lisa di Antonio Maria Gherardini, 1503
i.
a wave before
it crashes,
your smile
suspends itself,
making it all
the more effective
in the unconscious.
your disinterestedness
makes it
all the more momentous.
naïve and
omniscient, maternal
and unripe,
carefree and
caring, it embodies
all the archness
of the dialectic’s
false wisdom.
unforgettable but
forbidden feelings
stir in the sfumato
behind you.
prehistoric peaks
give anxious shape
to desire,
an open secret,
but you never knew
yourself well enough
to tell it.
you continue to vegetate
in your smile,
waiting for the kiss
of the right word
to release
you from its spell.
until then,
its grace
is the only bulwark
against the death
that roots
in the landscape,
the apocalypse
dressed up
in its dreaminess.
ii.
last fruit
of girlhood,
your smile
is offered up
for the male god
of art
to gorge on.
his eye,
a predatory
embrace
hypnotic
with its medusa promise
of immortality,
drains the joy
from your freshness
to make a picture
of the mind
he will never allow you.
your smile
is as profane
as any material
out of which art makes
itself sacred.
yet your simplicity
is too sublime
to master;
the god fumes
in the rage of the inconceivable
landscape,
envious of your abiding
innocence,
which does without him.
offstage,
at the crossroads
of the unconscious
the smile embodies,
i plant the kiss he could
not bring himself
to spare from his art,
finding in the erotic
richness of your drapery
all the poetry i need,
cryptic understanding
as well as
blinding insight,
and nerve.
Originally Published: Apocalypse with Jewels in the Distance, New York: Bel Esprit Press, l999.
