a poem from the book

Art & Dope

We drugged, we drank, we found a deeper life,
experienced to strange, to ghastly depth,
reality, awake all night with talk
with music and with poetry, took walks
through desolate night streets or forest paths
far from the everyday, from those whose needs
were met by things that could be bought, whose lives
took on for them sufficient shape from rules
a man night follow.

Through those richest hours
of night, unknown to anyone but ghosts
and lunatics and thieves, or artists (who
are all those three at once)—we, with a shove
from dope, fell headlong into pilfered books
on art of the medievalizing kind,
Burne-Jones and Morris, Hunt and Waterhouse,
where all is seen too clearly, and where all
is far too still, a crystal, soundless world
as lucid as well-lit aquariums,
or Spenser’s “World of Glass,” all caught in gloss
all over-chroma’d, jewel-toned, too detailed . . .

Rosetti women with the swollen lips
of vampires that have gorged, a redness such
as only comes from others’ blood.

Doomed blooms
of Art Nouveau, perverted into swerves,
a Child’s Garden of amoral forms.

Moreau, his women gangrenous with jewels
who loom above their pallid yielding males . . .

But none matched Mucha’s blessèd poster girls,
their fluent clothing, hair in weightless waves,
as though theirs were an underwater world
and they suspended in its eddies,
seeming not to breathe—
or is it just that we
must hold our breath before such loveliness?

These swirling girls, enfolded and disclosed
by dresses that expressed them as a flower
is explicated by its petals, both
a someone, and a symbol of herself.

In sinuous asymmetry, their hair
swept down in whiplash curves, as motionless
yet mobile as a vine. They did not go,
but grow here, like the flowers in their hair.
Their veins would flow no blood, just pallid sap
and chlorophyl of immortality.