Albrecht Dürer and me Read Free

and we push past him
    up onto the outer ledge
    fresh air at an eerie height
    I dare not look at those ants
    on the streets, plus I feel again
    that urge only satisfied by falling
    so I follow the steps back in
    past the stone curve untouched
    for centuries, its power intact
    on gangplanks, we enter the dome
    greeted by giant frescoes of hell
    devils’ red mouths roughly painted
    but so high above the worshippers’ floor
    they cohere, reminders that thousands
    for hundreds of years
    feared, turning quickly to find
    faces, robes, clouds
    of their sunlit saints

tour guide . . .
    holds high a wand or staff
    tufted with yellow ribbon
    so followers can spy her flag
    each group an ectoplasm
    that forms and bubbles around
    nuclear leader who directs all
    to see what cannot be seen:
    underlay of history burnt off
    by sun and sea breeze, her
    rapid-fire iteration of details
    they can’t find on their own
    eyes blurred by overload
    I watch always for the one
    who strays away, pulled toward
    sea or street ephemera as if
    he can only connect
    when silence surrounds him
    not mob hubbub pierced by
    shrill voice in charge
    I want to walk beside this
    wanderer, tell him to plunge
    down narrow streets, go blank
    in plazas, feel panic rising
    to be so alone, without
    a language and without a sign
    except for dog-peed corners
    church bells, gathering
    crones and a few old men
    familiars he grows fond of
    when he sits on a quiet bench
    as one who wears the momentary
    mantle of local garb, his hands
    though, still holding pamphlets
    and does he remember then
    the guide’s arm, how it must ache
    in the evening, and how her voice
    croaks when she speaks to
    her lover of her clever phrases
    intended to inspire but flattened
    made dull by day-after-day delivery
    that erodes pride of place and
    hollows out where breath comes from?

Albrecht Dürer and me
    at the Albertina Museum
    his entire life he thought
    of death approaching
    it was the century syphilis arrived
    1500 meant the end of time
    one self-portrait an imitation
    of Christ
    for me, it’s his rabbit
    each ear bent differently, every
    whisker visible
    its mood pensive
    another sort of portrait
    and his monogram –
    ad , 1502 (same year
    his medieval father died) –
    floats beneath the brown foot
    as I float
    back to rodents I snared
    in a winter garden
    frozen next day
    and still the fur soft
    (or back to fuzzy lucky
    charms on key rings
    among coins in pockets
    of the slightly odd)
    from him almost all
    German art springs, begins
    from me up pops this poem
    when here I stand
    (wanting to touch the painting
    and feel the fur again)
    one of many awed viewers
    this young hare has seen
    in five centuries
    even as he draws into
    the calm before trembling
    to ponder his animal thought
    and from my departing train
    I see him once more
    a tall buck alert in rows
    of early corn, escaped, free of
    any frame – though red dots
    of waving wild poppies
    defining the farmer’s field
    draw my eye to his readiness
    for leaping

Self-Portrait Nude
    I stand in front of a tortured portrait
    completed in 1910 by Egon Schiele:
    skin reddish and raw, a scraped skeletal self
    tilting, electrified by jagged outline of light
    eyes closed, hair livid red blue
    elsewhere in this museum
    hang works of his other distortions
    in legs and torso, some kink of the inner
    made visible, along with the more famous
    Gustav Klimts though they
    failed to hold me as did these hysterical shapes
    which perhaps foreshadow the artist’s death by
    Spanish flu, 1918, thousands dying contorted
    and now I recall my father also suffered that
    influenza in Detroit where he went to work
    in car factories, he and his brother for days
    sick in their room, young men – and
    did he know they might be dying, waiting
    and praying, no doubt they were praying, and
    though he believed in the strength of that power
    he could not deny the virus, illness eating
    in him so he coughed himself up – and