Dear Poet, dear Thinker—

                                     "Be aware of our privation; we die 
                                      an early death to feast your eyes."
                                                                ~ M.C. Escher, "Vase," from
                                                                   XXIV Emblemata, 1931


this is what I wonder: whether you sit, 
massive in the museum gardens or atop 

The Gates of Hell, your pensive pose never
changes— head in one hand, not a flicker of feeling 
passing across your face, despite the torment of all

depicted there. The count, his terrible mouth 
poised above the forms of his emaciated 
children; desperation hunched over  

and holding his left foot; lovers oblivious  
to anything but the body of their own desire. 
My grandmother scolded me for cupping 

my chin in my hands at the table: Malas!
she screamed, Bad luck! This wasn't a stance
associated with being lost in thoughtful

reflection but an obstinate conviction 
that whatever awful agony held you in its jaws,
it would never change; and therefore demanded 

a mourning. If thoughts are things and things 
have shape, sinews, flesh, a muscled body 
that contorts at what the mind might be 

forced to behold, then O, what innumerable 
spectacles of suffering to convulse even 
the most stoic! In famine or war, light leaving 

the eyes of the wounded or nearly dead; screaming 
child, naked, running from the bombs. Men and 
women spat at or stabbed or pushed in front 

of oncoming trains. What some kinds of language 
might describe as ordinary violence— the way 
it's said a stone could not possibly be moved.