February 2023
Bio Note: I finally found a few poems - out of my ekphrastic collection Engines of Belief - that line up with the month’s theme, opposition. I go to the Art Institute of Chicago every trip home and am enthralled every time. Meanwhile I roll the garbage bin to the street two times a week. My wife, Renee, and I build fires every chance we get on our back patio in a subdivision so quiet and unassuming that it threatens to fold us up in the arms of a sweet, thoroughly comfortable oblivion.
The Card Players
after Paul Cézanne, “The Card Players” These men are staring into fire, handling it, tossing tongues of flame to and fro. Between the brutish intensity of the man bent under his felt hat, and the wily self-satisfaction of the tall one - confident as he has always been that he has sat in such a place, in such a way (and if not him, his father; and if not he, his son) and that things have come to him or to his father or will come to his son in such a way between these two men - flame. They stare into the cutting and fanning of their fates. Try as he might, there is no way that the tall one can spy in these small integers any sign of the hands of a hung-over surgeon who will one day work in his abdomen under conditions less propitious than these. The second, marooned under his blue chapeau has often felt these flames as a light which rose within him, a property, a spell, like that which flushes across dawn pastures as horses whiny and stamp in lifting dew. Now he needs the table top to help hold up the weight of these particular cards. There is the seven - his seven children under a circle of lamp light, each lean, smudged; there is the ten of diamonds from Saturday last ... flashings as he hooked and pulled, ten successive bass from the landlord's pond; there is the Jack he was or that he intended to be that night on the cellar door when he wormed his fiancee’s garters loose; there is the black eye of his mother-in-law (Queen) as he staggered drunken through the door, her look stern enough to make him cloak his rage - turn and face the hearth again; and there is the King who sits across from him, who raises the ante that he should not meet, but does. The world around these men is nothing because it is not this fire ticking its shifting fractions, its fast mechanics. Fifty-two weeks, four seasons, fanning, shuffled. It is only by such dim and oily lights that we can see our fates at all. Each new card finds an answer in quick hungers or disgusts that flicker behind the sallow planes of their faces. Neither gives regard to what dirge the darkness around them is singing. They hear only the voices of these cards, these sizzling tongues of desire.
Originally published in Engines of Belief
On the Walls of Goya's Last House
I Francisco de Goya, “Duel with Cudgels” Two men planted as if their legs are roots. Around them a field of millet ready for harvest. The men’s feet are sunken in a roadway that forces the small throat of its song up through the countryside. Brothers, one sinewy, conniving, has a jackal's leer. The other, broad in the chest, so rufous it seems flames lick through his flesh. Each of them, mired and barely able to strike the other with his cudgel. II Francisco de Goya, “Saturn Devouring His Son” His forearm the length of a man’s body, Goya’s Saturn roars up from the bowels of the earth. Blood-thirst casts one lean flare of light. Mouth, a hollow cave, Saturn clutches his naked son at his maw. Frenzied, Goya worked to bear this single rift of light upon a wall of utter pitch.
Originally published in Engines of Belief
Father and Son
Adam Albright, “Portrait by San Luis Obispo”;Sections 1,2 & 4
Ivan Albright“Into the World Came a Soul Named Ida”; Sections 3,5
1
On the gallery wall
dawn's conch unfurls...
alabaster, turquoise, pink
beneath a feathered gold.
The Pacific slashes California shores
where a lad in sailor's duds
and sister dressed in simple smock
sprawl upon a promontory stone.
2
Albright took the children’s sweaty palms;
led them under a dark roar
to that weathered boulder so that
orchestral eruptions of dawn
would swirl around youthful grace.
As brine blasted skyward in sheaths,
as baroque balls gelled and flew,
the artist squirted tubes onto his palette,
dashed the tempo of waves across canvas.
He worked feverishly as a lavender,
a milky lavender, swelled through billows.
The boy’s stomach growled. Albright
commanded the girl to sit still
as brilliant droplets of brine
dried and stung her calves.
3
Adam Albright (father of the acclaimed
realist Ivan) did this portrait.
It is Ivan's grueling reflections
that hang in famous galleries.
It is the cynicism that lays across
Ivan's portraits like a sheen of motor oil
that won the twentieth century's approval.
In Ivan Albright's backstage scene
the odor of chrysanthemums smothers
a heroine named Ida. Ida has collapsed to gaze
past the purplish flush of her skin,
past sagging facial features, into the backing
of her dressing room mirror where a gold reflects
a brilliance like the faint applause from
which she just retreated.
Ivan acquired his disturbing sight
near the front in World War One.
Perched over soldier's cots
with a magnifying glass,
his vulture’s eye drank in details
of shell torn flesh as his hand
recorded facts for medical science.
4
Adam, his father, was a stern,
monocled man who relentlessly studied
how Parisians translated light into joy.
Adam stood in a tailored suit to daub lemon
into rising swells and never dreamed what threats
to Victorian triumph his son might witness.
He couldn't imagine that in twenty years this boy,
who quietly whined beside the Pacific,
would burst into flames on the German front.
It didn't matter that the children craved breakfast.
Cold, wind meant nothing to this artist
when he could milk an essence out of the sea.
Then make a moment stand outside of time
on a gallery wall where dawn's conch would unfurl
turquoise, pink, and mother of pearl
beneath a feathered gold, forever.
5
We know that every father wants his son
to dwell within the simple spell of light
in which these children’s portrait rests.
It was left to Ivan, Adam’s son,
to bear true witness. To unnerve us
with a vision in which time itself
becomes the subject; decay
the only immortality we know.
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Originally published in Engines of Belief
©2023 Ed Ruzicka
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