Friday, April 18, 2008

Fourth of Several Manifestos in the Voices of the Dead



Rembrandt Addresses the 1960s and 70s

You will move from black
and white to color,
from an etched world

to an urban landscape of vivid oils
that will scare and stun
everyone already

drawn in her best grays and blacks on paper,
line and outline of a leg,
her covered curves so clear.

Look back, I think, rather than ahead
to the glossy magazine and the Soup Cans,
and the neon Dutch Masters

on the billboard just outside the Queens Tunnel.
You will find your way into photographs
and acrylics, and will paint

so fiercely at times that your arms
will go numb. This will go ahead and happen.
So you’ll need your rest. Lie down.

I will come to you in a series of dreams and whisper
die meeste ende di naetuereelste beweechgelickheijt
and you will believe until you wake

that I really did see Christ being lifted from the ground,
heavy as a plastic sack of seed, fallen from a truck,

that I really did see his guards (like the men
in the grainy video of Vietnam, Munich,
Selma, El Salvador, the Moon)

confounded by the sudden appearance of flesh and color,
that I knew their desire to return to a world
of shades and shadow rather than this one,

its ridiculous deaths and resurrections everywhere,
colored in a television light so harsh I cannot begin
to find it in a human eye.


1 comment:

Ryan H. said...

Rembrandt is, by far, my favorite painter. Extraordinary talent.

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