Poetry

There, Albert Gleizes hangs onto the shouldered architrave,
fingers straining against the old gypsum. The archivolt widens
into an atrium with flower beds. Blood irises. And magnolias.
From Iowa, then Hanover. Gleizes now nibbling at honeysuckle.
 
There is a minotaur, hands thrown up in mid-air as if flagging
the two men in black to stay behind the white and blue line.
Two libraries have risen out of nowhere. Miles of books, tomes
littering the horizon like an archipelago, like old tortoise shell.
 
Huelsenbeck insists on interjecting his aria with something odic.
Let him draw the clefs as triangles, surfeit of sweet things.
Let him draw his instruments as unaccompanied and strong.
Let the parasol moments remain sudden and flaring, like joy.
 
Let him break the square corners of this body, now shanty
in its cupboard construction. Its edges and angles frozen, riveted.
Blake’s giant angel, keyed up to its own dark irony. Is it there?
Has all of the garden been drawn in – its bramble, acacia, cypress?
 
Gleizes knows the garden will percolate a warmer summer,
new world of sunnier days, an open esplanade, its champagne
the shade of stratus clouds. Two builders downing their beers.
At noon, the women in denim walking into the virtual museum.
 
Richard Huelsenbeck’s musical notes, ticklish and tender
as ivories. Hear the long four-minute silence as if time stood still,
its head dropping into the hollow of a creek, Gleizes’ eyes
locking in, as if witness to a new syllogism, its tract of paint.
 
Let Gleizes draw his decorative and industrial art. On the white.
Not to worry about what will stay, what remains resilient.
Or fades with time. There, another peony has drawn itself in.
Into a scene, a tea ceremony with kabuki, flamboyant and loud.
 
Into the third act, its pavement as thick and sturdy a roofing.
Limestone, a bit of bitumen. Let Huelsenbeck draw in circles.
Let him doodle. With pencils and crayons. Oils and acrylic.
He’ll place himself in it. And Gleizes smiling, in his big chair.


* This poem is a reprint. It won the Writers Billboard Poetry Prize.