I
Bosch painted it. Van Eyck, Angelico,
and others. Even those without genius
could show us what they saw. These primitives
where one painting does as well as any other
in showing what still matters.
They knew, as we hardly do, that the world
is an uninhabitable place, temporary at best,
the delicate balance between eternities,
and given the light of the last morning
they could portray it as it truly is
without the covering of grass, of clouds, or weather:
only a stony plain bound by sharp grey mountains
where a crowd has waked to find itself
stripped, possessionless, abandoned to the sky.
Naked they cannot hide the sins which flesh
has grown accustomed to. The glutton’s paunch,
the lover’s white and vulnerable thigh.
Some raise their fists against the slate grey sky,
but most look wildly about or stare
at the cool and unapproachable mountains
waiting in the distance.
Hell is their proud city turned to flame.
And now they stand outside the gates and watch
the gentle towers and parapets scorched black
and in the barren field beyond the wall
the resurrection of the shrouded dead.
And, if there is no hope, there is at least
the dignity of their despair.
II
Last night
I dreamed the end had come. Silent, impotent,
invisible as air, I stood by in
a hundred places: a stranger’s house,
a city street, an office and a garden-
and like a sleeper shaken from a dream
I witnessed what I could not understand.
A woman washing dishes at a sink
looked out her window calmly as she heard
something unexpected in the air.
Men on the sidewalk, drivers in the street
observed the weather in a cloudless sky
and kept on going. In an office clerks
and secretaries glanced up at the clock
without remembering the time. I saw
the same cold profile everywhere at once—
a pale face looking up against the light,
then bending down again indifferently,
only this dull reflex of acceptance,
then nothing else, nothing ever again.
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