The fellow traveller
A dutiful dilettante at the Museum of Art
I count the dewdrops on Van Huysem’s flowers
(the pimples on the curator’s face)
and praise a thistle painted by Snyders:
‘Sublime! An ass drools before it.’
I walk through the glass doors,
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green Thought in a green Shade.
Here at the Fountain’s sliding foot
I’m beside my self, absorbed by water.
Nature-lovers feed the ducks. Narcissistic
art-lovers see their reflections
disturbed by concentric circles.
A child’s model gondola rounds the fountain,
its clockwork oarsman stroking
for the far side of the pond. Imagine
going over seas, negotiating the Suez….
I travel through Cairo to the Hotel du Nil.
The guests are Daumier cartoons.
Austrian American French remember
spurring horses along the shores of Abukir:
Swiss English Italian recall
waterwheels circumnavigated by camels,
irrigated fields blacker than the block
capitals across the Great Pyramid:
BUFFARD, 79 RUE SAINT-MARTIN,
WALLPAPER MANUFACTURER.
A jackal howls –
a ponderous dog hungry for ducks.
Weed leashes him in the shallows;
he wrestles with tendrils, washing
hybrids brighter than Van Huysem’s flowers.
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