Remedios Varo’s Locomotion Capilar (1959)
Riding the bicycles of their beards,
wearing wreaths of cloud, they come,
they go, one roping the startled woman
with his rufous anaconda whiskers.
Only she looks at you, her fingers
splayed in surprise,
lifted off the cobbles and balanced by
the birds in the lower right
who dive and swoop below the scholars’
(I say scholars) pointed shoes,
in the ochre alley, the angled confinement
of the architecture, a triangle
of dark sky trapped by walls
and an arch. Starless, moonless.
A maze, but the men
are not amazed, their eyes serene,
contemplative, looking out of the frame, inward
at nothing, while the fellow in the niche
hoists the only woman, she whose eyes
register fatigue and surprise, she
who’s being lifted
out of the way so the scholars
can turn and turn again unhindered, un-
distracted in the warm angles
of sterility, angles and arcs, and the birds, too,
live in the angles, even
the birds live in the angles.
