Octo-Henry

Ancient Light, continued.  In which Our Hero visits the National Gallery, & sees himself - and history itself - in the mirror of a tyrant.  Memento mori.

       4

       

       London.  Boomdoom.  Budthud.  Sootfoot.

       No more rambling except by troubled sneaker;

       lost Henry says, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here. 

       But the maze's thread is a Sargasso root,

       

       grounded, if at all, in some impenetrable 

       drowning darkness.  Old Roger sailed here 

       with a job to do, to ratify the charter

       for his commonwealth – around the table

       

       the John Hancocks feathered like peacocks 

       and history quivered, against all odds. 

       Henry's forehead only gets the nods.

       He's no can-do canoe.  It's on the rocks,

       

       and schools him in Melancholia.

       That puffy wench beneath the magic square 

       and a black sun – Dürer's duration dere,

       so durable, so fort et dur, forever sighing ahhh. . .

       

       I ran across her there, across from The Ambassadors –

       in the Gallery, at Trafalgar Square, in the bull's

       eye.  Etched cube, an extra birthmark – spells

       out your kingly name. . . (for sea-worm funnellers).

       

       Take flight from routine, and you find your heart 

       stays home.  Or part of it.  And cunning Providence 

       with slant-eyed perspective suddenly invents 

       your skull on the canvas, under all the cluttered art

       

       implements, the dazzling tooled measurements 

       displayed full-face between the subtle hands, 

       impassive faces of those mysterious friends 

       – Holbein's Ambassadors. The tremors are intense;

       

       fat, squared, football-padded Paddington Bear 

       Octo-Henry is preparing to stir the continental stew; 

       beneath his burgeoning largesse, the music's raw, 

       the ants is marching even now; the skull is there,

       

       though you won't notice it immediately; 

       Anne's bowling toward her own pinned 

       casket beneath the green-skinned

       grin of the charnel dome, his Principality.

       

       Square Henry fills the frame, but he won't square 

       this with heaven, no matter how many

       royal portraitors request his fanny

       sitting on the stool of a bleeding Empire.

       

       The Ambassadors, those friends, divide

       down the middle; the table, with all those tools, 

       begins to split beneath unfolding rolls

       of tablecloth, the panorama unable to hide

       

       another dimension breaking through the seams; 

       your view must wrench away from view

       to see an ordinary skull stare back at you.

       It's Europe, breaking into splintered beams

       

       of reformation, into seed-spilled filaments

       of Henry's crosshairs split and double-crossed 

       beneath a diplomatic nod-and-shake, embossed 

       around in smooth doubloons in golden doublets.

       

       And wavering Henry stood between them, between 

       all these national frame-ups, between home

       and pools of London whirl; his kingdom

       comes apart of all this, his heart's unfelt, unseen.

       

       A black stone on a white stone.  Vallejo. 

       Anonymous Peruvian.  Or Blackstone

       on a white bull.  What's done

       cannot be undone – only echo, echo, echo. . .

       

       a free fall into Paris thursdays.  Reigning 

       humour.  Hahaha, cried the gravedigger, 

       skuldugger, ghouldogger, Londonbeggar –

       black's eternal fashion's blood sustaining!

      

The Ambassadors, Hans Holbein the Younger (National Gallery)