~ after "Paradise Lost," Raqib Shaw
There are things that bring me back
to myself as soon as I'm in their presence,
though I might not have known that to be true
the minute before— A window layered all in blue
on the lower floor of a gallery, the opening
lines of a cello that pry something open in me.
One morning I stood enraptured before a hundred-
foot mural, and a stone seemed to roll away from
a sealed tomb. The artist had applied brilliant
automobile enamel paint with fine needle tips
of syringes and porcupine quills. The many
avatars of himself crossed landscapes lit
on fire, studded with rhinestones, crowded
with creatures howling at the moon. Blue
baboons tore the hearts out of their shredded
prey like priests presiding over a sacrament.
Centaurs flung baskets of gold coins into the air.
Hordes of elk and hummingbirds stampeded
off the cliffs in a shower of springtime blossoms.
Yes, I see what our world has become, and what we
have become in it. Yes, I know what it means to sob
when I can't find words for the untranslatable. When
did we stop carrying lanterns for each other?
There goes a picnic basket holding fig jam, rare
cheeses, olives glistening in pools of oil:
abundance drowning in violent ocean swells.
And yet there's time to write this story on paper,
with ink, under a saffron tree. Time to listen to what
leaves and what arrives. To love, even now, what breaks
and is beautiful, what's beautiful because it breaks.
