Carnival

40 Max Beckmann Poems

From Three Painters

Much Much More

While we are straining to fit everything in, he

Seems to fit in much much more than we ever could

In our line by line cassation of verses. For instance

This seascape with a beach flag – not only

Does he fit in some pretty majestic

And peculiar clouds – and that’s just the first cab

Off the rank – he has some cliffs and palms too

Just poking their heads up over the hill, their tusks

Looking like the Sydney Opera House or, perhaps,

The Sydney Opera House as fancifully represented

By an overshoulder view of a fanned hand of cards,

Or a collection of nuns passing down a lane,

And there’s probably a half dozen other nuns there

Or trapeze artists or resting actresses with swords,

Stacked end to end like sardines in a can

That we had scarcely noticed at first, and possibly

Even a large shark, or swordfish echoing the swords

Already mentioned, sloshing about in the shallows

Or shilly-shallying under the chandeliers, shaking

Or shimmering just into view at the fourth glance,

All of which seem to break a few rules – the boring ones –

Of composition with the sort of reckless energy

We’d like to achieve here in these repetitive scale passages

And arpeggios in arbitrary groups of three.

By the Adriatic

A heavy serving of the present tense:

In the same year in which he meets 20-year-old Mathilde

(Who will become Cynthia-Diana, Quappi and his wife)

He writes, “I spent a fortnight by the Adriatic

And saw wonderful things. I’m painting still lifes,

Landscapes, beautiful women, visions of cities rising from the sea,

People bathing and female nudes, most of these

Many categories freely intermingling, and in fact

I’ve generally been able to avoid thought and ideas

In the way the confrontation with the female nude

Produces a vacuity or rarefaction or suspension of thought

Or suspension of language – or something – but you know.”

Far from the Sea

Is it perhaps Quappi’s coiffure under that hat

Which modulates him from one key into a remote one,

One which will henceforth become more or less his home?

Or might it be the stare of a wolf hound

Or a particularly tendentious blackbird or some such

Which teeters on a branch as Quappi first greets him?

Or perhaps the colour – a particularly atavistic green –

Of the dress she happened to choose that morning

While cavorting to some Mozart aria carried by radio –

The one which by extreme chance is the very one

His first wife was rehearsing when the glacier broke up

And a circus leopard escaped outside their apartment?

Can there be any limit to the extent to which

Coincidence can raise its pretty crest feathers

When such a face looks out from under a cloche hat,

Or any way of knowing what unexpected direction

The barge river in flood may take while still

Miles inland amongst orchards far from the sea?

Summer Was Raging

Summer was raging and putting extreme pressure,

Like a great bear hug, on the shrubbery, squeezing

From the hot breeze trees their cicada waves

Like the whooping of braves amidst groundswell

In the Whispering Gallery of the hinterland garden

Where answering cicadas pumped out crescendo tides. Indoors

Amongst allegories in the wet coalface gloom

Of the room were – well, must we say it? – objective

Co-relatives (hem) everywhere – if you’ll pardon the cliché –

A whole heap of them (o-c’s) all brandishing

Dutiful nuances of stored significance, as is

Their responsibility, several almost over-eager

To take on the role of symbol – to give a couple

Of instances: pirates, circus tumblers, tightrope

Walkers without a net, sharks in sea scurf,

Or a gaze with such a degree of receptiveness

As to suggest the situation where a book, sought

And located by catalogue on Monday, resists

Seizure by everyone else and waits until Thursday

To be read, with that particularly knowing inwardness

The painter seeks in the erotic subject.

In Girls’ Room, Siesta where the three indolents loll,

Accompanied strangely by a hooded ancient,

The clock on the table seems to gush floodwater,

The irises in a tight clump seem to gush

A mercury vapour or mineshaft phosphor light,

The buttocks revealed below the hoisted dress

Are impossibly far away from the shoulder

Suggesting a veritable Ingres-odalisque-excess

Of extra vertebrae under that patterned silk.

And somewhere in the course of that summer

Faint suggestions of a storm with no rain

Cross, one afternoon like a path through a field.

1917

Landscape with Balloon. First and foremost

One should say, heading for the sea coast

Of the obvious, that the balloon

Could be easily mistaken for a brown moon

With small suspended carousel. As well

One needs to note that the year – 1917 –

Lends the configuration of cerebral trees a green

Tousled Art-Nouveau kind of self-contained

Self-aware geometry. The street looks strained

Through a Munch sieve and could give

The impression that behind the arcade

A muted scream blurring its trees might – could –

Have been heard. And the road

Has been subjected to a touch of arabesque

Recalling Gaudi though as yet nothing gaudy

Has broken his canvas into hectic rows

Or columns of effects of overlaid colours contending,

The two glimpses here of crimson notwithstanding.

Forest Path In the Black Forest

Scrape-amethyst, Black Forest viridian

(Sort of) alizarin cart boards, horses

Black as the forest where (probably) no sun shines –

But where sun shines then expect – and find –

Spangle (star prism in blue black verge)

Plus ring of grass glass round trees –

Waterlily lake blur of moss agate

Beside the red road winding down with a

Serpentine bend like a question mark –

What else? Would – could - you say (if you wished)

The tree round which this bend descends tends

(Well a bit) like a woman stretching her arms?

Pink Chinese Hydrangea

Yes, well, they’re almost like a calcite deposit

Or part of a coral reef, a trophy brought

From the coast to be displayed under glass

Except that they’re swaying in the heat

Which is tending to contract them further to crenellations

As if they were all obliged to open again soon

Whereas where the shadow of the east wing

Gives them a rectangular bay in which to swim

They look quite assertive still. But, now,

Look at those pink stems like a sunset harbour

Of sequins or flushed floweret studs. And – look –

Like a bank of shredded petals torn from a book.

Two Wives

Now again the biographic graphic: his first wife,

Minna, is dressed to perform in a powdered wig opera

And he still has a mind to execute melismas there,

Even while married to Quappi who accompanies everything

With violin cadenzas and is equally

Desirable, in accordance with his stated wish

“That the woman, with tender hand, strokes

The mighty one’s forehead and in her soft body

Takes him down into the realms of dreams and art.”

Among School Children

By this is meant a corridor between trees

In which the Many is fused to one

Or two overarching ideas. Such an intensity

Is commonplace in his paintings just as

A landscape in Yeats is visited by gyres

And spacecraft and moons from other worlds.

So by the energy with which he disposes elements,

Beckmann arrests a scene in the road

Like an overturned cart of circus itinerants

Making them into something already elsewhere

Or prefigured in ancient divinations

And about to crystallise in his cohesive gaze.

A Walk in Frankfurt

A friend writes: We went for a walk along the Main.

He showed me Nice in miniature in the park

With palm trees, cactuses and philodendrons

All in the middle of German firs, from which

Cicadas suddenly burst into antiphonal zones

Waxing and waning in volume. On the road

We looked through the broad palm fronds

Like fretsaws, to the milling crowds. He exclaimed,

“I want to paint that. And more. Fantastic!”

Avoidance of the Word ‘Prick’

Putting his maulstick (device for supporting

The artist’s hand) amongst the alluring dunes

Or hillocks of soft concordance

Or establishing as it were his bishopric

In the territories desiring conversion

Or persisting and advancing the empiric

Through the garden terraces (do I need

To proclaim it – of her body)

He reaches the realms of dreams and art.

The aesthetics of description are such

That if every intimacy were to be described

At one remove, words might be held back

From dissolution, the essential inexpressibility

Of the nonverbal might be uncompromised.

He utters panegyric, is geocentric, cosmic, lyric.

Pretty

We’re talking here about a pretty

Severe case of

We’re talking here about a pretty severe case

Of wanting to be where

Willingly compliant otherness –

I mean ocean-wave-waving nakedness –

Is like a sentient valley with uplands and fields;

We’re talking here about his wanting

To be part of, to enter, many abstract nouns

And to regard them as objects of desire,

Of his wanting

Of wanting to be where the action is.

An Electrical Storm

A blackbird settles on a book pine

And reads aloud from its pages with frequent

Discursions and exegeses. The shiver

Of some legendary creature in the undergrowth

Is taken up by the acanthus leaves;

With rhododendrons beating their wings in agreement.

Further translation and commentary from the blackbirds

Is met with a general glossolalia

In the surrounding trees. The breeze

Whispers Louise then at once is a serious

Voice in the wilderness announcing the coming

Of white space, noise like knuckledusters

Knuckling down to dusting some Elgin Marbles

On the sky frieze above the trees. Please, firs!

And if it wasn’t quite like this it was certainly

Disturbingly wayward and twisted. Paths

Repeat the dark garden hose in coils

And a few drops of spit carry flint light,

Then a peculiar silence even from the fluttering

Book pine narratives as if the expression

Someone had stolen his thunder, a reference

To the theft of an invention for the early stage,

Were being bandied about in the arboretum.

While light and blackbird black thunder next

Lead to parallel rows of glass bead curtains

Strung from one end of the garden

To the other. These are soon shaken then parted

As if someone were showering and singing aloud

Selections from the musical from the opera

From the treatment of the novel of the book pine.

But we’re making heavy weather of getting everything

Into the picture – from the Upper Room wind gusts

To the bending and kneeling of reversed leaves.

After A Storm

The buddleia (or butterfly plant so called

Because butterflies delight in them) wave their spears

Which appear bright lavender as if retaining

Some of the brightness after the rain.

And now let us consider a question

Which the entire company of trees seems to voice:

Could the garden – we – tradition – reason –

Sustain this figure: The phalloi or spears

Of the buddleia penetrate the flesh of the air?

Such an effusion seems extreme. The trees

Are divided. Some turn their reversing silver leaves aside

While others still sway and call Yes! Yes! Yes!

A Willow Pattern Plate

There’s a little temple below sphere trees;

A small boat; a bridge with pilgrims

Who might be fishermen; willows, of course.

Out of the boat steps a Cyclops

Or Samson or King Kong who strides

Up to an Empire State Building, only now

Emerging, by a trick of trigonometry, from trees,

Carrying a Delilah or a large sheep

Or Fay Wray looking very – attractive,

So much so that manometer, magnetometer and Wheatstone

Bridge and Geiger Counter dials all go mad

As the monoplane appears on the horizon.

A Canal Leading to the North Sea

In a Force Five gale

With an umbrella set as a sail

Now involute, now exvolute,

As the arrow of night

Thudded into day’s cork target (What?)

And quivered there for a brief dusk,

I hastened to the canal:

Stained drain water, a smell of musk,

Colours all synthesised from mollusc.

I hastened to the sea wall.

There were swans and dolphins, Walpurgis Night,

And straddling women like birch in full flight –

The dolphins bearing women, the men

Riding white swans into a squall –

With stage curtains rising at nightfall.

Seashore, Mauve Coloured Sea

Above the Prussian night blue pool offshore

A cloud with one end of it in the shape

Of a pair of huge inverted commas

And behind them, the moon –

As if just out of earshot, there’s

A long conversation going on, with its ending

Still pending, since the rest of the cloud

Shows no sign of closure

But instead merges with others,

And behind them, the moon.

The conversation echoes on the mauve water inshore

And on the beach and stranded fingerlings pool.

“A Scene in the Drama of Infinity”

Cresting the hill or hauling towards the coast

Or keelhauling or caterwauling or catapulting

To panoramic vantage he is arrested at once

By the simultaneous arrival in the rose petalled agora

Of the snake charmer caught at the very moment

Of exuding charm, of the opera singer

At the very moment of shattering a wine glass,

Of the water-diviner just striking oil, a mendicant

Mending his ways, an actress at the very moment

Of believing in her other self. Everyone becomes monumental,

Turning almost to sculpture in the rush

To savour the moment and linger in these shallows.

Beholding and beholden he strolls on deck,

Struts on the dais, peers from the pier,

Pontificates from the pontoon – in short,

Delights in this pageant of poses – of which

The foregoing is the merest fragment. Yet he questions

Whether to depict them might in fact be to lose them.

A Rainbow

Well, before we go any further

(And it’s so tempting to take off at once

On this curve starting from the pot of gold

And aquaplane or body-surf over,

Over towards the sizzle squiggle swizzle cloud

At the other end where it fizzles out) –

We note the curious feature of this rainbow,

That it is not realistic: a lipstick pink

Dominates the bow and that dazzle flush is placed

Alongside a most engaging apple-green

Which in turn is rubbing shoulders with a shrug

Of violet then a streak of lemon-juice yellow.

And under all this one might tend to overlook

The rest: the viridian river, that very green

Used elsewhere for the disorder of Quappi’s dress,

And a tree like a streetlamp ablaze in white,

A rose-raspberry pink footpath meandering,

A funny little bridge over the river

Lifted into position there with tweezers,

A shed, another shed, another doorway,

A tiny train with flames showing at its chimney.

Girlfriends

“The sea my old girlfriend”:

She’s wearing stripes as we go to the beach;

She appears first a long way off. She’s waving

And I admire her marble thighs and hard breasts

In that lemon-yellow costume to match her hair

Long before she lies down at my side.

Meanwhile still far out on the horizon, also wearing

Stripes – in this instance tangerine or apricot –

There’s another beautiful Calypso walking on the water.

And my girlfriend notes and rebukes my wandering eye

So easily distracted by past mistresses, and even

Goddesses cavorting and floating in the waves

Under complicit and encouraging sunshowers.

I try to invent some excuse, until Calypso,

Large and splendid, surges in on the next wave.

Triptych

“The future lies before me the colour of orangeade,”

The past has adopted realism at last

For in it every colour more or less approximates

To what it should have been from the first –

Invoking a faithful sedimentary geology –

But the present – Ah! Now there’s a different

Kettle of fish – spawning and leaping up Niagara

While those same falls fall endlessly

Scarcely moving. As a result of this trembling, every colour

Has been fractured, fractioned, diffracted

To crushed diamond – a white beaded curtain

Which seems reluctant ever to rise.

“We Are All Tightrope Walkers”

In the orangeade-coloured late sun over water,

The sky sea-green, the sea sky-blue,

Quappi’s dress – See! a sky-blue-green,

A green lawn, rather more lemon-green, towards which

Someone walks under a green lawn umbrella

Shines out at last as a fleece of cloud

Is shorn, suddenly casting light on the subject.

Now we might be getting somewhere. Now

The striped awning let down over the horizon

Stops flapping and the mariners fending off Circe,

All hands on deck setting their sails,

Desperate for breeze, can be seen rowing into the sun.

“Is it not strange,” says the painter to his wife,

Straining to look to that vanishing point,

“That in every city I always hear the lions roar?”

Unrelated Things

A blindfold mermaid half in that world

And half in the world as seen by Beckmann

Turning cartwheels in a friend’s garden in 1938,

Still with his hat on – after which he urged

“Can you do that? You should learn. Very important” –

This upside down performance entirely of a piece

With the avowed principle of “several unrelated things

All unlikely, all happening simultaneously”

Such as we see in contemplating for instance

The naked figure, when the visual field divides –

And divides – into intention, essence, individuality,

Provocation, implication made loudly explicit,

The volumetric-lyrical-assertive confronting

The religio-pastoral-ruminative etc., etc. Ergo

The blindfold mermaid, still emerging, still silver wet.

Jaws

Just when you thought it was safe to go back

Into the swarming labyrinth of pirhana, slavering

White bears, dogs, carnivorous plants, it was.

And so, while the jungle chanted, at full volume,

“It’s quiet! Yes it’s too quiet!” the painter, lost

In reverie selected a particular brush and a particular

Shade of flake white and proceeded to slather

Wave crests, pre-dawn auroras, haloes, waterspouts

All over the midnight blue water.

Sabotage Implicit in the Very Act of Beginning

For those who just came in:

Max Beckmann has been endeavouring to juggle

All and Everything by the simple device

Of keeping at all times one element in the air

So that the finite receptive capacity at waist level

Is able to give the plausible illusion

Of containing the rest. Of course we all know

That One into Two will go all too easily

And that, before you’ve looked, some malcontent

Has thrown more elements in with those in the air

And the whole caboose becomes crowded with caribou

Migrating in their millions – and – well, you know how it is,

He takes his eye off the ball for just a moment

And he’s suddenly swimming laps and wondering where

The evening air has gone with all its flowering trees.

Difficulties To Be Avoided

The best method is to select a place while not

Letting it see you settle into the director’s chair.

A lot of bonuses, extra frequent flyer points and free gifts

Will still accrue. And if you wear sunglasses

And look to the side so as to give little away

The danger of oversimplification may be averted.

Take for instance the fountain as subject. Implicit

In its purpose is its incompleteness; it is always

Waiting effusions still somewhere back in the pipeline

And the excess or consequence of its action – the overflow –

Is discreetly carried away so that we are watching

Process rather than end product. In this way

The fountain avoids the difficulties of many objects,

Namely the tendency to be seen to be

Lagging back in the field, faltering, falling behind

So that the viewer has himself to provide

Encouragement to keep them – marble plinth, say,

Bronze horseman, table, chair – up to date

And in the present. Now gradually concentrate

On objects which might in this way be recalcitrant

But view them in the close proximity of the fountain –

Then you are ready to take paint box and brush

And with caution signal a readiness to proceed;

But we warned: a lot can still go wrong.

Beaux Arts Ball

“After a lot of whisky

I danced with Andrea and then Aurelia.”

The musicians, all Dalmatians and Alsatians

Never once paused and never once returned

To the beat. After whisky

Taken in glasses hacked from a glacier

I danced with Alicia, then Anastasia,

Whose apple-green silk dress and corsage

Of pink orchids abraided my tuxedo.

After whisky I wrestled with a large panda

To change partners so as to dance

With Adelaida whose sky-blue hat

Blew me away. Over her bare shoulders

Loomed the long arcaded view of a yacht

Foundering in a lake breached by the sea.

After a lot of whisky found out a sink-hole

I danced with Alessandra in whose silks

Embonpoint and décolletage contended in equal measure;

After which I danced with Anthea and Augusta

Who in violet and lemon tulle respectively

Were prominently forthright and unwavering.

The San Andreas Fault opened along party lines

At the party where we drank whisky

And I danced by default with lamenting Ariadne.

But under her citron ruffled and ruched

I admired Alexis – her Californian tan,

Her sternum like a potter’s thumbprint.

The Beckmann Maxim

After dancing from dusk to dawn

With Ariadne on the Adriatic

Noting landfall, then sandbar, then surf ridge, then skyline,

Then rose-fingered cloud banks

Layered one above the other,

And with Arkansa and Azimuth and Anna-Lisa,

And with Adelaida with Beethovenian energy

Uncovering veil upon veil upon veil –

After whisky and dancing and dawn light,

His compositional principle would be established

And flourish forth, embodying

The Beckmann Maxim: Stacks on the Mill.

A Mile Offshore The Sea Makes Its Move

The line of waves a mile offshore,

Where the sea first reaches the tremendous decision

To breach the sandbar and enter the lake,

Waves white banners like distant political protesters

While inshore a motorboat shows less subtlety

By turning abruptly across a placid anchorage.

At this moment in accordance with – and almost

Seeming to attempt to exploit – his policy

Of More On Still, the swallows

Loop and cut and swerve and swoop – and much more

As they of course always do – and return

Again and again almost brushing his face

While somewhere in the general area of the influx

Further content strains to gain entry

In the form of flooding light from a cloud rift.

Letters to a Woman Painter

Three years before his death Max gives advice:

“Learn by heart the book of natural forms

And use them as one might the musical notes.

For Nature is a state of splendid Chaos

Waiting composition at our hands;

That is the very thing these forms desire.

Remember that the great Cezanne resolved,

By plunging into these chaotic forms,

Through Nature to achieve the Classical.

Let others wander, lost and colour-blind,

Through dry-as-dust texts in Geometry –

We will enjoy the forms which give themselves:

A human face, a hand, a woman’s breast,

The body of a man, the expressive gaze,

The infinite arching sea, wild rocks, the strange

Phonetic language of black trees in snow,

The heavy lethargy of summer heat

Where Pan, our old friend, sleeps in dappled shade,

The carnival of ghosts on stage at noon –

Who speak their lines and flaunt their motley gowns

And make us quite forget the griefs of the world.”

The Last Year

An aneurism in one vein of Time

(To coin a dubious and distasteful phrase)

Produces in the Present something like

A streetlamp or a billowing balloon…

A lot’s then crowded into a little space…

Time like a carafe of water in a train

Already restless, overfilled, in which

He wants to pour yet more and more… He goes

To every concert by the Budapest Quartet

(And must therefore have heard late Beethoven),

He visits “the best circus in the world”

(Barnum and Bailey) with Marino Marini…

He finishes a Columbine, who has

A bright pink hat, but in these numbered days

He paints out her yellow stockings, making her

A monumental femme fatale in black…

He visits the Metropolitan Museum

And lingers in the presence of a Titian…

Then after Boxing Day, 1950

On his way to the Metropolitan again

To see his last self-portrait, lightning strikes.

Dangerously Close

Uncomfortably awkward yet splendid and various

Everything which refuses to tessellate roped in

Nonetheless, gloriously galumphing displays

Of unequal dimension crowding into the space,

The refusal to assume Nature has been schooled

In the School of Lorrain: thus

Beach Promenade, Schevingen, 1928, where the sea slide

And the boy’s head and the shed he impedes

And the huge cloud and the toppled red

Bridge or derrick and iceberg and the promenade

Streetlamps which look bent – are all made

To fit in somehow, to say nothing of a taxi

Trundling dangerously close and ferrying

Its woman passenger over a footpath glacier

In a picture plane like a blown-up paper bag.

Fandango

The act of painting is preceded

By the act of synthesis or compaction

Which is preceded by the act of staring – Ah!

The all singing all dancing

All whistling all caber-tossing all trampolining

All gazing all mesmerising

All confronting rock wall and vast

Horizon like a serving tray of clouds

And forest like a stampede of sheep

And ploughed hill like a striped dirigible…

All likenesses aside, the thing is

To find room for the thing itself.

A Complex Figure

Imagine, if you will, a Bach orchestral fugue.

Now, if you can, imagine the parts

Multiplying steadily until it’s not quite clear

How many voices are competing. Thus far

No real problem. But now

Imagine several lines going off

At a tangent or getting lost in the woods

And tramping about, smoking perhaps, in some glade

Or going off out of earshot, as it were,

And wandering into an inn and sitting

In the stained-glass gloom

Over a tankard of something cool and lethal

Before at length saying, Well, we’d better

Be getting back – they’ll be expecting us.

Tonight is flying fish frying night,

And canasta and home brew bottling

And gemstone polishing tumbler maintenance

And sharkwatch at the dockside mariner’s chapel.

The 65 dollar question is whether these errant

Wayward and wandering strands could ever

Be returned to the fold in time for a cadence.

Tightly Stretched Substratum

Things happening like this parrot (!) alighting

Yes alighting with never a by-your-leave

That is to say in attacking a pear

From a wild pear tree in the flooded lane

It alights (!) on the surface of some sort

Of substratum, one in which things happen

With something suggesting a leaf falling

On an outstretched tympanum or trampoline

Making a slight and resilient crease soon erased.

Things happening have a way of happening

That is not entirely consistent. Depending

On ambient conditions – temperature and pressure, say,

They may begin with something of the attack

Of a musical note (observable particularly

If recorded then played backwards) or

With the surprise of an aeroplane imperceptibly

Making a perfect landing so that we’re looking

At sheds and shingle beach and ambulance flashing past

Before we discover we’re actually back on earth.

On other occasions the moment of impact

Of the happening may seem just then oddly

Blurred or in temporary low cloud

As if there were some delay or slippage between

Touch-down and walking across the tarmac,

Between the see-sawing or variable moment of happening

And its eventual place in history. In this interval

The parrot flies away, the painter lifts his brush.

Transmogrification

Flann O’Brien humorously suggests that a man

May become part bicycle and a bicycle

Part man by transference during a life of bicycling

And that this is in fact observable

In the stance of a bicycle and/or man

Leaning against a wall in sunlight.

This he extends to the scarcely controvertible fact

That contact may turn the walking man, in part,

Inevitably, again by transference, to earth.

Considered in this light the engagement

Visible in Beckmann’s Odysseus and Calypso

Might be seen as a depiction of such transference

And their entwining – with attendant beasts –

As an arrested moment in that long process

With Odysseus passionately serene, perhaps about

To leave the island, Calypso serenely passionate

And desiring still further transference –

For here we are surely witness

To man in the process of becoming

Woman, in the white waterfall of her presence

By every modality of contact

While she to an equal degree

And by an equal and opposite exchange

Becomes male. The process may take a lifetime.

Both he and she acknowledge it, both

Are intent on reaching its halfway point

Before Odysseus sails from the island.

Painting in Braille

In Beckmann’s massive particularity

And his emphasis on impingement

Viz., on male/female intertransference,

And the extreme collision, externalised in his work,

Of the physical and metaphysical,

We are reminded of that eccentric instance of contact,

Rilke’s crackpot or nutcase or numbskull theory

Of the cranium and the phonograph:

– Would it not (he asked) reveal secrets of the psyche

Were we to adopt the principle of the gramophone,

Whereby the spiral path is traversed by a needle

Which vibrates to reproduce the original resonance,

And allow the needle or sliver of wood or fruit pip

To traverse the grooves in the cranium

And release primal music? What revelation

Might be discovered by using the skull

Of Beethoven? Such musical phrenology

Is of course bizarre and has no immediate

Echo in the paintings of Max Beckmann;

But nevertheless every contour in every picture

Might have been traced out by blind fingers.

Peripeteia

The axe-blow must fall,

It is attached by a lever to the sun

Which as it rises gathers weight and torque.

There’s a swimming pool scarcely aligned

In any satisfactory way with the coast,

There’s a storm cloud like a fish

Which may or may not be predatory,

May or may not introduce a libidinous element,

There’s a window through which probably

The half-naked siren must remain

Forever unattainable as the sun’s cogs

Turn and the axe falls.

Canvas Being Virtually Unobtainable in

Amsterdam, 1945

Scarcely had the painter risen from sleep

And a dream of unconsummated and sublime desire

When that sheet was stripped from the bed

And fastened vertically to a stretcher

And the painting Afternoon begun. Work proceeded

At a feverish pace from December 1945 to July 1946

When the painter was overcome by hunger

And a longing to lie down again, only

To be distracted by the idea of adding, at right,

A strange plant like a green plasma lamp

With pink flower bubbles to offset the thighs

Of the subject as she lies within reach

Of the aggressor who is as happily menacing

As an airborne headache or bacterium

Enlarged to the size and shape of the male.