The Critic

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.

T.S. Eliot

Abstracted in aging gallery halls
made fragrant by one hundred
years of saturation, linseed on mahogany
wainscot and the canvases–the clean linens
and the used, the scrap boards hauled
home from some squalid alley after another
night of soaking in absinthe, promising himself
he would not squander and I am left
only with this–

the ploughman turning asunder the season,
air heavy as moss at the end of summer
heady with liquor of fertile earth and living rock,
irises clawing at the heart with hooked green blades,
cypresses swirling into the horns of a lemon moon,
stars pulsing with divine light above an unsuspecting village.

My heart warns me not to raise my eyes,
nor peer into the beating hearts of stars nor gaze
too deeply upon the night wind exposed
and raw for mortal eye to see. What we see,
we see and in the seeing are changed,
filled with joy and unquenchable longing.