Ars Poetica
The shell of the papershell pecan can easily be broken
in one hand but is so thin it cannot be
written on, like the carapace
of the cicada, enclosing those hollow
abdomens that buckle their ribs
all night. We find them each morning:
notes hung by the nape
on hedges, the shape of their sound
lifted to a branch like the ex-voto
boti, their own life-size
wax effigies, which Florentines
in the Renaissance suspended—
as an offering or in thanks—from the vault
of Santissima Annunziata.
Leonardo sought
to reconcile the apparent contradiction
between a static, lifeless
artifact and the enlivenment
it provokes, to understand how the words of
the dead go on speaking. No one ever knew
a pecan tree to die of old age, but because
even ink drying on paper takes part
in the process of aging, he thought the life
of a work of art must be
measured by its vivacitá, how well
it can vivify a beholder—like Charles Ray’s statue
of Boy with Frog, standing on the Grand Canal
in Venice, which must be protected
from assault, both day and night,
by a living person.
I once dreamed a word entirely
Baroque: a serpentine line of letters leaning
with the flourish of each touching the shoulder
of another so that one breath at the word’s
beginning made them all collapse. E spesso moiano
parlando, Leonardo wrote: we die, very often,
while we speak, the way Common Swifts,
named from the Greek without feet, never settle
voluntarily on the ground but spend
their life, in faithful pairs from year
to year, in flight. They drink, eat, rest
and often mate on the wing: late
in the season they gather, circling in the air
above their nests, calling out
to each other as they ascend
to sleep.
