Malte Persson



Amor, Baglione, Caravaggio

by Malte Persson



What can I add to Caravaggio?
What can be fastened like Cupid's wings
(sloppily glued, apparently) onto
the boy with the dirty toenails, lording
among the props of the theatre?
Poetry's parasitic sponging off other forms,
other forms of art, is no art:
Language's angels lay their eggs in everything
infecting everything with meaning.
Like stagnant water, blackness
gleams through the centuries of daylight,
tapers or the dim light of museums.
Scornful spotlights give a glimpse
of material components (oils, varnish...) fix them,
tracked by the lighting of your eyes.
Or would light-power be a better word?.
But you need money more than words.
Pigment, everything that makes life colorful,
is expensive. The competitor, Baglione, notes:
“Two Divine Loves done for Cardinal
Giustiniani, which have Profane Love,
the World, the Devil and the Flesh
beneath their feet.”Their unsoiled feet.
There are always at least two loves
and they come in different sizes.
Who can satisfy the demand?
How many centuries until Monday?
Forehand, backhand; brushstroke; slam.
Among craftsmen and criminals
security guards and schoolyard classes,
whose sneakered toes cannot, like thoughts or
someone's else's intentions, be seen. There
I am walking, wearing, am I a host for
yet another pair of dimly-opened pupils,
like disease-bearing mosquitoes
homing-in towards a light-injection
whose prerequisite must be darkness.
Search-lights, radar, x-rays, restorations:
An angel burned in baroque Dresden
under a swarm of bombers.
But Cupid, whose name is also Amor,
-Amor vincit omnia!-
still lives in Berlin. The silent impressing
of history's brushing wing into dark amber.
While we, in a fever, tumble out of years,
into years, into a most saintly earthy darkness,
where wingéd Cupid pollinates thoughts
thrown open that they may be plucked:
cryptogamous fate. Carnivorous
species. Art- the art of survival-
not to let yourself be governed by a genre.




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