MICHAEL YOST is a poet and essayist living in rural New Hampshire with his wife and children. His essays and poems have been published in places like Modern Age, First Things, The University Bookman, Dappled Things, The Brazen Head, and others. He substacks at The Weight of Form.
The Concert in the Egg
And now we climb the marble stairs, and roam
Beneath the LED’s electric wash.
We see, within the art museum’s dome.
A painting by a follower of Bosch:
I
Placed in the quarter of the upper right,
A snake hangs on a branch that seems to grow
Out of the chaunt-book’s leather back. By sight,
Notation’s bars and measured ratio
Are present, silent. See a branch suspend
A slender rosy jug for furniture,
that seems impossibly, to rest its end
Upon the polished, creamy curvature;
While further up the branch, a basket holds
a dead upended bird, an orchard limb
With fruit, of shadowed pinks and quiet golds.
It dangles lusciously, almost by whim.
Then sang the funnel hatted quack:
“I read the birds, and note the star,
And scan the viscera of pigs
For knowledge of the things that are.
And these are the most casual facts,
That anyone could understand.
The world expands, goes round, contracts,
And blows like grains of gusted sand.”
II
The lapwings, stork, the bat in half-light blacked,
An owl, with eyes in back of the beaky head,
A neck that twists like one whose body’s racked,
Are met, as ghouls who come to eat the dead.
The owl winds talons in a wimpled nun’s
Habitual veil. He hovers over tangled
Night, who sees much, hears much, in the sun’s
Departure, over air presiding, angled
On eastern winds. And he is thus their vane
and orient; eyes black, intelligent
of good and evil, of desire’s pain,
And old rebellion’s rich impoverishment.
And harped the man with the tuberous nose
“To make a lad feel young and gay
There’s nothing like a tub of beer
Make haste, for all things pass away.
For drink and life are much the same:
There’s both too much, and not enough.
I drink enough to keep me tame,
And to forget the other stuff.
III
Over the open fissure of the shell
— Whose slabbed sides cracked like pistol shot,
Or plates of broad midwinter ice in hell,
that frigid deadland, deep as hate or thought —
Thus, in the dimming dawn, (or end of day),
The snake is honored in its figuration.
A type and image merely for the way;
Effective only via dispensation.
One man, birdhouse on head, in back, observes.
A stork stands on the crimson chaperon
Belonging to the piper who disserves
His neighbor’s ear with wheedling semitone.
And pipes the man in the scarlet hat:
“The wealthy never need resign
their riches to the poorer man.
Of Virtue, Wealth’s the surest sign.
My avarice is needed, too;
It all coheres, in one great whole
Where good and evil, false and true
All twist toward one final goal.”
IV
Beneath the egg’s receding, round horizon,
a village of the plain lies feverish,
Afire. Floating in darkness’ orison,
A leopard guards a tender, cooking fish.
A tortoise plods beneath the egg as well
Who’s yet to be flipped over, unstrung, bored
And hollowed with a knife blade from his shell
To make a merry lyre’s sounding board,
And blend all chaos in harmonious love.
His peeling, wrinkled hams drag needled claws,
His ancient eyes scan all the scene above
For food to pinch and tear in beaky jaws.
Then sang the fish on the cooking grill,
“The fireside is near and warm
But though it burns a bloody red,
I know it will not do me harm.”
Sensation heats my chilly flesh
And is a sign, at least, of life.
A sign is substance, rendered fresh,
And cannot lie, or deal out strife.”
V
Then breaking out, a monkey blows a shawm,
And hunching, gazes cunningly at you,
And grips his instrument with hairy palm,
As if to hide it secretly from view.
The egg tilts on a ledge, half off the ground,
Into the dark, where, lit by new moon’s shine,
An elf prince sits, attended all around.
His nude well-favored, red-skinned concubine,
Flirts and displays herself to minute men,
Who tender their respects, with downcast cross-eye,
to her idolic, tiny frame; and then
All nuzzle closer with their stiff probosci.
Then sang the scarlet elfin queen
“Come close, my thin-legged lovers all,
There’s more to sight than you have seen.
Come feel the flesh that caused the fall.
There is no love that knits all life
Together, save rampaging lust,
Therefore, embrace me, little men
And bend your bodies as you must.”
And at the centre of it all, alive,
Bizarre, grotesque, and painted out of tune,
Out sprout a clutch of human beings. They strive
Like lilies in the thorns inopportune.
Remember: “ex nihilo, nihil fit.”
What hen, I wonder, laid and warmed this brood?
What blimpish, half-breed cockerel seeded it
With half-born harmonies and music rude?
Then sang an echo from the egg:
“I am myself, a ship of fools,
And all my crew are born in me
And learn my inner logic’s rules.
They breed, and fight, and learn to play
The little game I teach to them.
It is a game where no one wins.
I hatch them only to condemn.
And when at length, they break my crust,
And venture through the outer space,
The darkness is all light to them,
And all the road before their face.”
We leave the gallery, and take the street.
And silence breaks beneath the weight of feet.
MICHAEL YOST is a poet and essayist living in rural New Hampshire with his wife and children. His essays and poems have been published in places like Modern Age, First Things, The University Bookman, Dappled Things, The Brazen Head, and others. He substacks at The Weight of Form.