And this next poem was written after I
had the experience of watching my son Elijah and his younger
brother Bennett in the Old Masters' Museum in Brussels.
And they stood in front of Breugel's canvas
The Fall of The Rebel Angels for several minutes.
And it was a fun thing to watch happen.
And so this poem came out of that experience.
It's called Fifteen.
Oh, I'm going to shout things out occasionally.
And those are my children shouting things out.
Terrapin!
Tentacle!
In the atrium brightness, my son's delight presses
so close to the canvas the guard coughs a caution.
The commotion of wing and fang that
is Breugel's Fall of the Rebel Angels hangs like a trespass.
Claw!
Carapace!
Like a curious cabinet had sex with a scavenger hunt.
Salamander!
Halfway headlong down his hurtle one handles in his demonic fist
a fish basket finned with switches.
Another faller sledges into swallowtail.
The fleshy edges of his lewdness startled with butterfly finery.
A third hurdy-gurdy!
is girt with the garnet and sudden gold
wings of the Lucifer bird.
Every peculiar pursued to its foundering
is part something else.
Armadillo!
Esquire!
As agog at itself as at an ambush of angels.
My angels half plunged into each your own strangeness.
Gangly and almost in need of a shave.
Amphibian!
Astrolabe!
As the transiting sun through the window pane
frames you momentarily still in your mutual conclave of puzzle
and name, I observing can guess why the heavens mustered taking
to trumpet and frantic buckler.
Some with swords would arrest that reverseless.
Pufferfish!
Fall!
Holding fast their once familiars by force.
But see in the ether a flourish of grasses, a mass of seraphs
suspended weaponless.
I suppose those horns clarion, not in discord,
but in blessing.
A benediction on the dim bewildered way ahead,
which as yet, they do not know, and so cannot regret.