Joey spoke to himself behind his mask of mute. People didn’t make sense anymore. He was in singsong thoughts, and all that was reaching him was the rising scent of his scrambled eggs and the underwater music of voices. Colored, they were, and in his mind he swam.
***
Art: “My friend Pierrot”, by Max Ernst
Old age is a smarmy being
that pushes you from behind,
confusing you with multiple choices
and dithering doubts.
Cutting some strings,
and tightening others,
it challenges your daring of pain,
and wants your attention during sleep.
Ah, this life and its just desserts.
***
Art by Remedios Varo
In we stayed, us kids, during the short days of that long winter, while Grand Dad saw to the animals and smoked his pipe. Well, what can you do in feet of powder snow in the flatlands? Not even good for a fort. Checkers. Cards. We fought. We read in kerosene light.
***
Art: Winter landscape. Neskuchnoye, 1910, by Zinaida Serebriakova.
In his hurried dream
of effervescence,
of disintegration,
our man had a knowing
that his neglected heart was more than the sum of his parts.
***
Art: Paul Klee, The Man of Confusion, 1939
All the days that I knew you, you hummed while you were working. No one ever had to tell you what to do. Most of us smiled as you bustled about. Some rolled their eyes, but I thought of you as a bee going from flower to flower. You made a song, and the angel was in the details.
***
Art: “As the Volante”, by Remedios Varo
Though my bones are broken,
I will stand erect for you
while you’re in this room.
Would a nicer house help us?
One with rooms further away,
but with furniture placed more warmly?
Each day,
the headlines grow more stale,
and I despair of a gentler world.
***
Art: Litzlberg am Attersee, 1915, by Gustav Klimt
In paint, you have described my dreams as if I were your ancestor and you had come across dusty tomes of them, written in too-early wakings. And it’s so odd and pertinent that the visions are all Untitled, yet seem to have come from my own cold rooms, leaving blanks on the walls.
***
Art: “Untitled”, by Zdzislaw Beksinski
Some things
make eyes dead
as a great white’s,
the soul a yawning maw
seeking the holy.
Swimming long and long.
***
He dreams of things with tattered wings, open mouths, and lolling tongues. Heaven’s impostors, fallen from grace. Thirsting but never slaking, they lie impaled in the pines, their chill voices forbidding all who may think to touch.
Art by Zdzisław Beksiński, untitled.
Damocles,
the imprisoned cat,
is known to the spirits of forest and fen.
By night, they bring to him the saving light of a golden afternoon.
***
Art: “Cosmic Energy”, by Remedios Varo
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