Misrule muted, nature receives
a storm’s polite greetings.
Transformed by the gentle school
of ineffectual colors (tactile,
intellectual) feminine memory
bows beneath the golden signature
of the shattered tree,
Rambouillet’s masculine amnesia.
The world has altered
to suit no ideology.
Along the unwobbling spectrum
of an audience at ease
the sky remains laden with a lake’s
darting tigerish lights, dusted on
during an hour of great light,
lucid phase among the birth pangs.
Look again, with the picture at rest
before your mind’s eye. Its virtue
is to be utterly purged of language.
A mute, if unmistakably, European landscape.
The incline seems drugged, unrolling with an insomniac’s fatigue.
The lush distance silent, a graceful skirmish seductive in detail.
Lassitude cannot inform the shadowy process of Rambouillet and
its colors. Humidity breaks the warm confusion and saves us,
the partying boat requiring no such rescue, unaware of the
cramping frame nor (its) any (their) color scheme which,
other than at Rambouillet, would be murderous.
Triple sec’s asphyxiation, heroin’s zero degree.
‘ineffectual’
Beauty’s mate unfolds its strength of waters upon an abyss
divined as transparent only after the godlike moment when
the eyes surrender to the crystalline expanse created
in a climate of simulated mastery and neurotic skill,
skill that is never wholly sane nor masculine nor powerful.
THIS is the divination that rhythmic inattention prevents
possession of ……….. in such a world (as Rambouillet)
one is tempted to deny sin while attending a guilt
which never arrives.
The universe’s love of redundancy outvasts my flimsy search
for variation, my pigeons knowing nothing worth the cooing,
Comus’ luscious liquor not to be refused.
There is no duplication of the unconscious now,
not for a world of people half asleep, whose holiday takes them
soundlessly and by surprise, unraveling before their eyes
their fears, the chimeras they fly from, into the politesse
of thunder and rain.
The hue alone
repays surrender
speaking from deep ignorance of history and motive I write
‘the hue alone
repays surrender’
Central to Saint-Cloud
we are forked,
right and left
towards
baldachined stages
(the play might
be a mummer’s
clue, an atmosphere
of mime and sweet
unfocused serenades)
and leisure
and soft laughter
are
not frozen frieze-
like
but adrift
in a warmth
which occults
and fades cool
repeatedly through my imagined scenario
partially indebted to the inscrutable African boy
and his lifted, extravagant, plume
Why insist
that one
or the other
of these two
composed
and brave dreams
is the exact chameleon
of an irrecoverable
though remembered
dream of my own?
I don’t insist,
one is
An eighteenth century rose,
a libertine’s mandala
as though carved
in water
‘fete de Robert Estep’
……………………..
with my friends
there in the boat
and my friends
before the canopies
and vague
entertainers,
we will discover
in a natural
Place de la Concorde
the statue of a man-with-hat
we will
clear
the base
of ivy
and
find
his name
still legible
to be
read aloud
and repeated
as
in
a gallery
with
nodding
and
soft
recognition
F R A G O N A R D