I.

Insight, never a stranger,
appeared (as love does)
suddenly naked
beside you.

The thing you wanted to say
but did not know how.
The word!

At night almost asleep
you—Inspector Clouseau—
tracked it, awkwardly,
introducing yourself to its neighbors,
catching its scent in the forest,
fumbling toward it

till there it was
in your path.

A fox, singing it.

 

II.

Turns out you’d been following
not the word for a god—
the god itself.

 

III.

Bosch’s triptych
Adoration of the Magi
has shutters—
shuts like a coffin.

Upon the closed shutters
a painted man
praying at an altar.

Dull, dull,
the closed mind:
godless realm,
knees on stone.

Yet opening the shutters
to the three panels
is to thrust your head out a window.

O mystical landscape.

Baby Christ in the flesh!

 

IV.

And suddenly everything
became clear,
Chekhov says.

But even the sun’s rays in the sky
have shadows.

(Could it be softer)

Look: out that window,
on the right panel
over Saint Agnes’s shoulder,
a dog eating a man.
(the thin celestial)

You cannot unsay it, the word.

(ladder of sound)

Now the god,
now the chaos of song.
Unveiled.

(to the
eureka)

 

V.

All my revelations
concern sex.
I wouldn’t found a religion
on it.
But…isn’t that dog
fucking the man?

 

VI.

I wake to howling,
not a fox—
the mother dog
that lives behind our house.

She has a new litter.
She eats garbage
her body transforms
into milk.

 

 

---

John Wall Barger’s book of essays on poetics and film, The Elephant of Silence (LSU), came out this  spring. He’s an editor for Frontenac House and lectures in the writing program at Dartmouth.

 

 

 

Image: Hieronymus Bosch, Adoration of the Magi, 1485-1500. Source: Wikipedia.