Hearing Dog.

 

‘El Perro’, (The Dog), is one of  Goya’s series of  Black Paintings, which   decorated the walls of his home, the Quinta del Sordo, (the country house of the deaf man).

 

He can’t hear his gloom clattering about the house.

That is my job, hearing for him, but what could I do

other than catch Leocadia’s sleeve. She fed me

before she knew that she must humour him,

keep him painting.  I sit at his feet, jammed

against the wall, as he works, waiting for him

to kick out and curse.. ‘Son of a bitch’,.. but not today;

it’s linseed , and the scratch and swish of  brush on plaster. 

 

He was up before her, found his boots. And, oh, got the lead. 

We walked slowly as the day warmed, air letting slip

its rich smells. By the river the mist had lifted;

I pawed his leg to tell him of the danger;

the water’s rush, the city beyond with the cries

of his ink wash subjects, and those obdurate

church bells.  He shaped to take the lead to me;  

I have too much of his lost sense for my own good.

 

A boot presses hard into my back. He stares down

at me, then at the wall, eye and brush, go to and fro.

Given his art, I would have arrived at myself

differently, not the perplexed look, but eyes

masterful, ears pricked, guarding him against

the glum featureless  backdrop he wants to paint.

( I would have my say.) He shifts his weight,

off my back, and stretches to change a brush.

 

I hear him digging out oil paint.  He has set

my sad head at the lip of  a fresh dug hole

as if I had buried the bones of mankind there.

If you follow my eye line, I seem to be

listening on behalf of  a shade, a someone

roughly painted out, who is as deaf as dark.

I want to nip at their tenuous sleeve

and tell them of the danger in helpless space.   

 

Melancholia 1  

Albrecht Durer records in his diary that during his travels in the Low Countries,

he often gave away a pair of  prints: ‘ St . Jerome in his study’ and ‘Melancolia 1’.   

 

He had stopped me on the quay.  Throwing caution    

to Antwerp’s dissemblers and bawds, I thought

what harm could come of an old  man  doing

my portrait ?  There was time for my mug to get

touched up  and topped up with ale.  Taking the board

that the lass brought drinks on, he fixed paper to it

and set to with charcoal sticks.

 

His eyes roved among faces at the tables,

then stared at me wistfully, as if  drawing

from the inside.  He wouldn’t show me  

but, on parting, gave me two scrolls.

I put them away where I could safely forget.

Yesterday, when the black humour and nagging came,

I found them, as if I was meant to: the prints.

 

One calmed me: a room somewhere is caught in a burst

of sunlight, light that etches a halo for a man

at his letters.  Everything stops as if the moment

were blessed.  By his desk, a lion dozes, a wolf

catnaps.  On the window sill a skull holds back

on its wake up call; death can wait until

the snoozing is done, till the ink is dry.  

      

As for the other, I wish I hadn’t

met the earthbound angel; we are as alike

in our puzzlement.  Even with the tools to hand,

we cannot make what we will of the world;

dogs starve as the cherub scribbles our failings.

The sand in the hour glass petrifies,

and acid etched futility numbs.

 

There is ladder propped against the heavens,

off-print;  I’m minded of  a ladder fixed against

the quay, and stepping down to the leaking

wreck. The boatman who punts the Ship of Fools,


greets me, stashes my knapsack of  lost days;   

from the prow, I consider my portrait  

drawing through the dark swirling water.