Another draft

Temptation,
after Chagall’s Temptation (1912)

My God, you know, how temptation sits
  in the belly of the world,  red fruit, round, 
  already bitten.  

You know it is not all that matters. Small, hooved creatures,
 tiny birds, Eve’s several glances, and the canopies 
  of  red and blue leaves matter as well.

The real fall will be to believe in Pablo.
 Apollinaire will love you, your round house and the herring brine
  on your father's hands.

Bella loves you, even as you grieve for the Shtetl, for the pale Christ.
  
I understand, my brother, the desire to pare a body 
 into something that will serve beauty.

You understand, my brother, how the world 
 revolves around the edges of the world.

Let the others  eat their fill of square pears on triangular tables,
 suckle at the circles and the cones.

I want to eat, together, whatever we’ve been given.
 The moon behind the garden will be green and will disappear quite soon.

I want, as well, to thank you for this: I woke today  
 and was surprised, like you, to see that I am still alive.

A couple of notes on process in regards to this poem.

1) Earlier this summer, I read Jonathan Wilson's biography of Marc Chagall. Wording of some lines, as well as some of the context of 1912 in Chagall's world have likely been stolen from this good work.

2) Apollinaire wrote these lines for Chagall: "your round house where a smoked herring swims in circles . . . a man in the sky / a calf peers out of his mother's belly" (See Wilson, p. 51).

3) "Let the others eat..." is an adaptation and extension of Chagall's own comment about Cubism: "Let them eat their fill of square pears and triangular tables." He also announced, later, that as Europe was going to war he thought: "Picasso, Cubism is done for!" Picasso often said disdainful things about Chagall, though the two were able to have a semblance of companionship at points in their lives.

Day 21--Rejected Lyric for a New Setting of the 23rd Psalm

Selah, lah, lah, lah, lah, lah

The Lord is mine, shepherd and word,
divine, I shall not rot.

He bleedeth me inside and the leaden
waters besides which have fled.

I will shear no evil. You plod
and you laugh to comfort me.

You prepare a label to bore me
in the presence of mines, beloved empathy.

You surround me with harp and with lyre,
keep away the barbed liars

all my days, all the shadowed grays
of my slow, grazing life.

And I will chew on the grass,
alas, the Almighty's grass,

on the lawn of the Lord, or never. Again.

Greatest Hits Gallery--Jason A.

Jason A. has a huge range of material in his portfolio, much of it attending to classical music. His poem on Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings takes the form of a questioning the composer. This popular piece, one of my favorites, is often taken as a piece of "accesssible" 20th century music. But Jason weighs it heavily with theological concern, concerns that he explicates in a midrashic way.

(on Adagio for Strings, written to the Crucifixion of Christ, by Samuel Barber)

Remembrance
Samuel,
did you see the weight of despair beyond word set in full
upon sorrowful shoulders, when the sun was hid on a windless day—
or was it Toscanini who seemed hid when without a word
this breath from your mind was returned in full?

when he exhaled his broken words that fell short of heaven,
angels from afar looked down on this son of man
but offered not a sword, not a hand, not a tear.
yet when word returned that your beloved breath, Adagio,
had been committed to such a mind from afar,

did you see the twisted, beaten head that thought on you
while to him not a word descended from above,
though he to his Father is forever close as Sun and Light?
only from beside his bloody, detestable shell
fell the scourge, the hammer, the weight of Adam,

as eminence did upon you, held you immemorial.
when arrives diminuendo and fades from the air,
can you recall this forgotten man of sorrows?

Greatest Hits Gallery--Laura M.

Combining ekphrasis and midrash, some poems focused on art and some on music, made up the heart of Laura M's portfolio. Two of her pieces are sonnets, formally adept yet playful and devout, on panels from the Ghiberti Florentine baptistry doors we viewed earlier in the fall at the Chicago Art Institute.

Meditation I: On Ghiberti’s Creation Panel, Front and Back

I saw Ghiberti form a god-like face,
And on the hidden back imprint his thumb;
His wax seemed bubbled, lumped, crude—all its sum
Could only hint at some forthcoming grace.
And when he broke the bronze from its clay case,
He turned aside to make more tools; before
He purified with heat the lustrous ore,
His Maker’s face the lesser sculptor chased.
That higher Sculptor needed no bronze pools—
No chisel but His breath for chasing tools;
A Word was metal fit for the world’s panels,
And for its sprues—affixed as saving channels
Through which His molten grace could freely run—
He crossed upon its back His only Son.



Meditation II: Adam and Eve on the Creation Panel

He paints the smaragdine new world with gold;
Our vitiated eyes must have a screen
To see the angels’ song-tied gaze—the cold
Bronze shields the loss of Eden’s perfect scene.
The snake is captive, bound in low relief,
So we, imprisoned viewers, may keep free
From memory of fear and sudden grief
That our lives could be strangled, like that tree.
But then—the master sculptor lost control!
His balance tilts—a host of weeping wings
Cascades in flood from heaven’s cut-glass bowl;
And through the downpour Michael’s sad fist swings.
From that deluge no fallen frame can hide,
Though torn leaves show that—goodness knows—we tried.

Two by Stephen Frech

Poet Stephen Frech has written an entire collection of poems based on the life and paintings of Rembrandt. A number of these could be seen as, in part, ekphrastic midrash, a faithful, fervent troubling of scripture for meaning and insight through the further refraction/commentary of Rembrandt's many biblical paintings. Here are two.


Christ at Emmaus—Stephen Frech

One asked the stranger to divide the bread
and the flame wavered as if a breeze crept in.
Pausing for a moment, the inn’s day done,
he listened to the distant kitchen clatter,
a woman bent over a basin
scrubbing the day’s grime from new pots—
tomorrow, who can discern yesterday’s from today’s?

So the stranger took the loaf in both hands,
measured with his thumbs the seam
where he intended to break it,
showed it to one many saying, “This is for you.”
As the crust tore, the cup tipped
and spilled its wine that ran the length
and seeped through the cracks of the table’s planks.

Knowing him at last, am I the one froze in surprise
or the other, fallen to my knees, my eyes cast down
seeing some far field I’ve never lost sight of
and that, if only I’d set out, a day’s walking
would have brought to me.




The Adoration of The Shepherds—Stephen Frech

They entered slowly like birds wanting bread.
Unlike any other seed they know,
it stirs a hunger a day of feeding won’t sate,
a longing so desperate that, skittish, with quick eyes
watchful for the other fist,
they risk feeding from your hand.

The smell of the barn fouled the nostrils:
the day had been long and hot,
the animals labored hard.
Crushed bindweed dried on the hooves of cattle;
the horse’s collar hung on the wall,
its padded leather still damp and rip with horse brine.
And hay, just on the far side of fermenting,
spike the air and kept the cows dreamy and docile.

An old man carries a dim lamp into the light of the barn
and the flame is merely flame now—a busy sliver.
It hardly casts shadows of its own;
its light barely reaches the rotting loft boards.

He hadn’t expected this, not at all:
a new mother, so young and at ease
with the baby as only young mothers can be,
generous with all the strangers craning to take a look.
She doesn’t know—how could she?
The shadow on her breast is only of her hand.


from If Not for These Wrinkles of Darkness (White Pine Press, 2001

Rembrandt: Midrash and Icon

See the power point on Rembrandt: Midrash and Icon from Tuesday's class. Also, Ryan Pendell's blog. Much more to come.