Читать книгу This Place of Prose and Poetry - Lucian Krukowski - Страница 5

What place, Place, do you have in art?

Do random visits create clutter in your spaces?

In my house, tidy sweepers safeguard clarity

and promote friendship between the lookers-on and runners-in-place.

When die Reine, die Feine, die Eine, comes knocking, I let her in.

She knows I am as one with her despite our many names.

Truth, Goodness, Beauty, need no subordination.

They are engorged—enough already—with their parochial instances.

They should not—cannot—be further reduced to just one.

But their progeny: The purely factual, wholly universal, and

indisputably tasteful—although too hard, too soft, and too just right —

can be made friends.

For this, they need a nice cold shower in the all-together

which would merge their separate quivers into one big shaking.

Otherwise, the long contention between inherited forms

begins to smell of sediment and a stale crotch quaking.

Red-spot-here-now, you are not invited to my place.

For you are prone, with your cowboy hat and downtown spurs,

to cutting my continuum into separated pieces.

In a different light and other times, you appear as

four-square, large and somewhere there.

But your now is mostly past and yet not here.

You do not care, alas, that each true piece of reference,

when bereft of out-of-date compliants,

becomes more overtly nasty than the last.

Why don’t you then, failed reference, abandon

the Church of Truth that preens as context-free —

avoid out-of-date states of the Good and Beautiful —

and join the flow of beer and bragadoccio

that woos and cools us on a summer’s day?

This is my place—the best I know

where I can be free of you—

you nit-pickers for the knowable.

But now the day is done.

I have to let the sweepers go

in order to let all the Reine, Feine—

and, yes, Meine—stay.