DELTA

Doubt not the artist and his age (though bald as the pilled head of garlic), married or divorced and even vying downstage, are both aware that God or Caesar is the handle to the camel’s hair. Ye weeping monkeys of the Critics’ Circus (colorless as malic acid in a Black Hamburg grape), what profit it to argue at the wake (a hurrah’s nest of food and wine with Auld Lang Syne to cheer the dead), if the artist wrought (contrary to what the black sanders said) for Ars’, the Cathedra’s, or the Agora’s sake? No critic a Gran Galeoto between the Art-lover and the work of art, the world-self of the make- believe becomes the swimming pool of a class, the balsam apple of the soul and by the soul and for the soul, or silvered Scarahaeus glass in which Necessity’s figuranti of innocence and guilt mirror themselves as they pass. If brass, in the name of Id or Sinai or Helicon, wakes up the trumpet, is it to blame? Although the moment’s mistone and the milieu’s groan sharp an unbearable ache in the f of the age’s bone, this pain is only the ghost of the pain the artist endures, endures, —like Everyman— alone. The artist is a zinnia no first frost blackens with a cloven hoof; an eyeglass —in the eye of a dusty wind— to study the crosses and tangles in warp and woof; an evergreen cherry parasitic upon a winter sun; a paltry thing with varicose veins when the twelve fatigues are done. Under the Lesbian rule of the seeress Nix, blood and black bile mix: in the second of a bestiary-goat’s caprice, Elan, the artist’s undivorceable spouse becomes a Delilah of Délice or a Xanthippe bereft of sonnets from the Portuguese. In Chronos Park the Ars-powered Ferris wheel revolves through golden age and dark as historied isms rise and fall and the purple of the doctor’s robe (ephemeral as the flesh color of the fame flower) is translated into the coffin’s pall. The St. John’s agony of the artist in his gethsemane without a St. John’s fire— the Vedic god of the snaky noose discovers; his far far cry, like the noise of block tin, crackles the sky: “Wayfaring man unneighbored by a wayfaring tree (though one may rue this bark of the Moreton Bay laurel), it is true a something trans- Brow or cis- Brow —or both— wills one to the wings of the eagle, or to the teats of the sow. Yet, no lip need sneer to the beard of an ape of God, ‘Thou thing of no bowels, thou!’ So, I say as the Sire who chastens and rewards, ‘Let thy blue eyes resist white stars of red desire.’” Like the shape of Africa, the raison d’étre of Art is a question mark: without the true flight of the bat, it is a hanker in the dark. Not as face answers face in water, but as windows answer each other, one viewer, lyrical as Hafiz in his cups, discovers a lark; his companion, flat as an open Gladstone bag, spies out an ark. The blow of a fist on the nape, this question came from a Dog, “What color can escape the fluky flues in the cosmic flux?” Perhaps the high-C answer lies in the wreck the sea sucks back into her bowels. Let the Say be said: “In Philae the color is blue; in Deir-el-Baheri, red; in Abydos, yellow— and these are by the ravens fed.” Art is not barrel copper easily separated from the matrix; it is not fresh tissues —for microscopic study— one may fix; unique as the white tiger’s pink paws and blue eyes, Art leaves her lover as a Komitas deciphering intricate Armenian neums, with a wild surmise. At once the ebony of his face became moodless—bare as the marked-off space between the feathered areas of a cock; then, his spoon-shape straightened. His glance as sharp as a lance- olate leaf, he said: “It matters not a tinker’s dam on the hither or thither side of the Acheron how many rivers you cross if you fail to cross the Rubicon!” Postscript: He was robbed and murdered in his flat, and the only witness was a Hamletian rat. But out of Black Bourgeoise came— for John Laugart— a bottle of Schiedam gin and Charon’s grin and infamy, the Siamese twin of fame.