Picnic, Lightning by Billy Collins

Author:Billy Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780822991052
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Musée des Beaux Arts Revisited

As far as mental anguish goes,

the old painters were no fools.

They understood how the mind,

the freakiest dungeon in the castle,

can effortlessly imagine a crab with the face of a priest

or an end table complete with genitals.

And they knew that the truly monstrous

lies not so much in the wildly shocking,

a skeleton spinning a wheel of fire, say,

but in the small prosaic touch

added to a tableau of the hellish,

the detail at the heart of the horrid.

In Bosch's The Temptation of St. Anthony,

for instance, how it is not so much

the boar-faced man in the pea-green dress

that frightens, but the white mandolin he carries,

not the hooded corpse in a basket,

but the way the basket is rigged to hang from a bare branch;

how, what must have driven St. Anthony

to the mossy brink of despair

was not the big, angry-looking fish

in the central panel,

the one with the two mouselike creatures

conferring on its tail,

but rather what the fish is wearing:

a kind of pale orange officer's cape

and, over that,

a metal body-helmet secured by silvery wires,

a sensible buckled chin strap,

and, yes, the ultimate test of faith—

the tiny sword that hangs from the thing,

that nightmare carp,

secure in its brown leather scabbard.

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