Two more poems.
Gail Orlen, who's a terrific painter,
was in an art history class last semester.
And she had to do a term paper on the German painter, Albrecht
Dürer.
And she became fascinated by one of Dürer's self-portraits,
a self-portrait done in 1500, him
facing outward from the canvas, with his hand
in a strange, almost arthritic gesture.
It's an incredibly compelling painting.
She ended up doing a self-portrait of herself
within the same pose.
And I became fascinated with it because it was so compelling,
and because Dürer himself had written
what, to my mind, at least, was something strange
on the painting itself.
And I've enclosed that as a quote within the poem.
It begins, "I, Albrecht Dürer."
But Dürer also was the first painter
to do extensive realistic self-portraits.
And it seems like it's the face of modern man, in some way.
It's also the face of Christ, in a sense,
because he imitated the Man of Sorrows paintings of Christ.
It's a very somber painting.
One other thing you should know.
In the year 1500, everybody was going crazy
because it was one of those 500-year spans when
they thought the end of the world was coming.
I think that, for the year 2000, I
hope I'm alive to see everybody go nuts.
I read in the newspaper about a month
ago that someone who assumes--
a corporation has been made up of people with money who
assume that the world will, in fact, come to an end
by natural destruction in the year 2000.
And they're building a community in Texas
for all the people who believe as they do, OK?
That's going to be a great place to live.
But what they're going to do is, when the year 2000
comes and things start to go wrong,
they're going to go up in big dirigibles.
Use that ride up in the sky waiting for things
to even out, and then come back down again.
Poem's dedicated to Gail Orlen.
Title is "The Face of Dürer."
And it simply runs-- it's from the self-portrait
and runs into the poem.
The face of Dürer is perhaps the face of Christ,
had he a moment alone in the jail at the city of Jerusalem,
just before his deliverance to another, intelligent enough
to both ritualize the judgment and absolve himself.
Thus, perhaps the artist face of Pilate also.
Men like this recognize each other,
are aware of the burden of another's seriousness,
which justifies their own.
I, Albrecht Dürer, the northerner,
have painted my own portrait here, in the proper colors,
at the age of 28.
Outside it is 1500.
The world is crazed with its own ending,
is allowed no believable consolation.
Sometimes at midday, only the rumble of carts may be heard.
All he is doing is bearing witness to himself,
though he will be the first and last of us to do so.
No revelation, none at all, unless his genius is itself
the process of revelation.
The figure emerges from its black background,
the hand's singular gesture, the face that helps
identify, identify the future.
There will be no plague, no further wars or oppressors.
We shall stand like this a long time, as before a mirror,
as before one another.