The world as Bruegehl imagined it is riddled with the word:
Whatever's proverbial becomes pictorial; if people habitually
Go crawling up a rich man's ass, they must be seen to do so
(through an orifice widened for the passage of three abreast;
The rich man, scattering coins from a sack, pays them no heed).
If people are in the habit of turning into toads without notice,
They must be seen to do so; if the owl is said to carry
Nestlings and nest upon her back, she must be seen to do so.
The world as Brueghel imagined it is hardly easier to read
Then is the one we glibly refer to as The Real World:
The proverbs get forgotten, or their meaning leaches out,
And in the unmoving frame all motions are arrested
In an artful eternity--the hay runs after the horse
Forever--so that we cant always tell coming from going,
Or literal good from allegorical bad, or artsy-versey:
The Cross may be headed for Hell, the pruning hook for Heaven.
But it remains, the world as Brueghel imagined it,
A plenum of meaning though we know not what the meanings are
In every place; and after having once experienced
The innocent and deep delight of understanding one
Or another emblem, acknowledging his just equation
Wedding the picture to the word, we take his word
In many matters wherein we have no further warrant
Than that his drawings draw enciphered thoughts from things.
So if the Ship of Fools is propped up on a pair of barrels,
Or if a man is shitting on the Beauty Shoppe's roof,
Or if Saint Anthony is somehow tempted (but to what?)
By a helmeted human jug with dagger and diarrhoea,
So that he has to turn away his halo and his head,
We get the picture, as we say, though we miss
The shrewd allusion to some ancient smart remark
That would have told us what we know and never say.
The world as Brueghel imagined it is full of decaying fish
With people in their hulls, it is centered on allegorical dames
With funny hats, who queen it over the seven deadly sins
And as many deadly virtues--the millinery architecture of Pride,
And silly Hope standing on water--: it is the world we know
and fail to know that he has seen for us and minded too,
Where from Cockaigne it's but three steps to Heaven or Hell--
Hallucinating, yes, but only what is truly here.
Howard Nemerov
Gnomes and Occasions (1973)
