Abundance

In Breughel's great picture “Canal Street,” restaurant customers order roast swan instead of chicken, hurled salad instead of tossed salad, while shoppers spill through a maze of stalled trucks and scurry around the sidewalk stalls jammed with countless nameless things that housewives sidestep to surround a Japanese man in a broad-brim hat and painted silk tie as he demonstrates how one gadget can cut food 50 different ways and though they don't understand a word he says, they stand transfixed by his spiel amid the fumes and noise and loud fruitvendors dropping casual perfections of sun and rain into bags and sacks against a backdrop of silver towers and sea and fields vibrant with excess that giddy farmers hail by tossing animals, large animals, into the air to be carried away on the winds of exuberance to the four corners of the globe where the romping gods bear so many attributes they're a bundle of incongruities and no one takes them seriously not even their beaming angels who parachute drunkenly down to the shore distracting the dogs let loose on cormorants that ate so much they can't fly but not the boys in the rowboat who have caught a blowfish, tickled its belly until it's about to burst like a balloon before dropping it overboard to watch it blow itself backward to kingdom come, nor the other children who have stopped clamoring over the stranded whale's back to swim out underwater, under the swans, grab them by the legs and yank them down in a slow fury of bubbles and light and then sell them to the market near the restaurant in the foreground of Breughel's great picture “Canal Street.”