La Musique
(after the painting by Henri Matisse,
1910)
I
Music is made
Mystical sounds
Mythical incantations
Intonations
To the wind.
The Players rehearse
Their ancient songs
Magical conversations
Colloquies
With the earth.
II
The five of them
Fiddle and flute
Chorus of three
Burnt offerings
Such innocence
Against a purple sky.
What music they make
So simple their song
How humble
Guileless and red
Are prayers they play
To the wind
To the earth
And sky.
Boy Leading a Horse
(after the painting by Pablo Picasso,
1906)
The horse
Led by a naked boy
Equinal desire
In gentle hands
Sweating yellow light
Of summer
Which controlling which
They are as one
Ready to ride
Into eternal praise.
Dream
(after the painting by Kuzma
Petrov-Vodkin, 1910)
It was our dream
And only ours
She a girl like us
Asleep
So lithe
So smoothly elegant
The small curves
Of her breasts
Legs together
Revealing so little
To our eyes
And still so much
While in the distance
Yet so close
That we can feel
The heat
A volcano
Waiting to erupt.
The Visit (Two Sisters)
(after the painting by Pablo Picasso,
1902)
Whatever careless words were said
Between the two
Whatever moments lost
To quarrelsome tongues
Whatever secrets passed
Like whispers in the dark
Whatever silence filled
An empty space
Whatever colors they had known
Now there is only blue.
The Birthday
(after the painting by Marc Chagall, 1915)
A green day
On a green-picket cloud
It is their home
And the war seems far removed
The phonograph plays
A funeral dirge
And the woman
Dressed in mourning black
Holds tight to peonies
Pretends that death is birth
A beginning
And not the end of dreams
While the man in twisted space
Expects a kiss to bring back life.
Monogram
(Robert Rauschenberg, construction, 1959)
If it were a genuine animal
Instead of one composed
Of oil on paper, fabric, metal, wood,
A rubber-soled heel and tennis ball
On canvas with the body of an Angora goat
Painted whorish face and all
And rubber tire around its waist,
Mounted on a flat collage,
Itself on caster legs,
It would be of a species all its own
A taxon of its own
A genre unique and separate,
Certainly extinct by now just like the unicorn.
How it might have moved, lumbering
Like a pachyderm or springing Ibex-like
From dune to dune, or moved at all
With a Goodyear tire around its waist;
Where it lived, in forest, mountain crag or short-grass field;
And how it fed, whether like a skulking
Lion at night or pasture sheep,
Is anybody’s guess.
And I can only begin to surmise
The complexities of its birth and mating ritual
Or, in fact, if it were born at all
Or issued forth, full-grown,
From the artist’s mind.
Now it looks at me from its wooden stand
In a museum somewhere
As if I were the last one of my kind
In a phylum of my own
Speaking a language of my own
And regarding me, simply, as just another
Species about to go extinct.
The Ribbon of Extremes
(Yves Tanguy, 1932)
There are no angels
On the third planet
Out from the sun
Nor on the fourth and fifth
In any galaxy,
No demons,
No grammar containing
Human sounds.
There is only this:
A landscape of discarded shapes
Shapeless, leafless
Trees that bear no fruit
And bend their shadows
On a vanquished sky,
Plastic armaments
Dripping like a melted clock,
Machines that do not move
Their spider arms
Weave no earthly webs.
There is only this:
A necropolis of liquid steel
The aftermath of timeless war
The aftermath of time
Gone mad.
Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird
(Joan Miro, 1926)
It is not so easy when you have
A single eye
And single foot
Enlarged by gout or some other indignancy
To kill a bird that looks so odd
A rooster’s comb its tail
But flies so swiftly
That no predator, not even Joan Miro,
Could pluck it from its flight.
Nor do we know the why of it
The reason any man
Not even with a giant foot
And any sense
Would want to kill a bird with
A single stone or any stone at all.
An arrow would do as well
A gun more instantaneous
If you were inclined to kill a bird
For some slight of etiquette, or
The need to taste its feathery flesh.
The point is this:
To tell the truth, there is no point,
That is what Surrealists do--
Clocks go limp,
Man wears bowler hat,
Man throws stone at bird:
Their meaning in a word
Absurd.
Neil Ellman is still a retired educator still living and still writing in New Jersey. His ekphrastic poetry appears in numerous national and international print and online journals, and he has published four ekphrastic chapbooks, the most recent of which are Dali's Clock (Flutter Press) and The Great Metaphysician and Other Ekphrastic Inventions (Erbacce Press).
