Jean Meyer Aloe Poetry Prize from The Academy of American Poets
Rückenfigur
By Lennart Nielsen
After the visual musings of Caspar David Friedrich at Agrigento, imagined and true
The man of fog and water steps onto the sand.
Once, it might have moved him, Caspar, to see
such waves as these on his mind’s inner shores,
where Dresden violins proclaim the coming of his brush,
where he peels the sun and milks it for color. But now,
christened in the waters of success, he seeks the rock.
He hikes the hills behind Agrigento, where villas
tucked into the dust-green grass opine their rectangle roofs
to flocks of wintering birds as orange landing strips.
His peacoat and his fattened arms flap, flounder in the breeze.
I painted birds, once, he scoffs, those flimsy fools who twinkle
their beaks at the setting moon. They taught him how to soar.
Leaving such anachronisms, Caspar finds that history
is not a lesser myth. He erects his canvas on the edge
of the valley, on the lip, where the lapped lips
of his contemporaries wax poetical about the nature
of the past. But he, Caspar, sees only the thrust, the thrust
of the column, the majesty of older things. These
are the fundaments of man, he sighs. Here lies the womb.
He is alone with his feather hat, and would be with the stones.
Where masters once wrapped clay jars in dust-blushed togas,
he, so roused, spills himself onto the Doric foyer.
When he sculpts paint at last, the ruins appear
in a purpled glow. So watered by creation’s fever, pillars grow
in strokes as lush and bold as romance would desire.
There grows a gentle sunset over the far coast, where,
once, in pasts of liquid amber, the girls and boys
of other peoples sang the anthems of a manly age. The pilgrimage
of progress, thinks Caspar, bemused by wafts of intellect,
is one of soft light wrapping hard stone, ever growing. Indeed,
it grows. Sporting new splendor in the evening glow,
the artifice awakens. Caspar fondles the toppled rocks.
A primordial sigh: time plunges to touch.
What he feels then, Caspar will feel again in another century,
when his frames hang in the stately halls at Vienna.
When I am history, Caspar ponders, I will be stone.
What is a statue but a stone? What is a statue but a permanence,
a wrought ancient, demanding to be touched?
Masses of voyeurs will feast on me, he thinks,
as I feast on these columns now. Perhaps a future master,
for there must be more, students of his craft, will paint him
in these hills, so perched and bare, so canonized, face forward to the past.
He thinks of Caroline in passing and wonders that she never was a myth.
—
His dreams are not Sicilian. Unbeknownst to him,
the mutton-chopped German is eyed suspiciously at the tavern.
These poor farmers, he thinks, sated. They will never know beauty in rocks.
The locals spit in Southern tongues, lambasting Caspar’s blue-eyed smirk.
A strange bird who mumbles, and ponders and chuckles, no more.
Here is another, growing bold in the dusk of the almond groves.
He does not hear the nightly songs, emitting from lost stars.