Song of the Eiffel Tower

Song of the Eiffel Tower

for Lillian and Meyer Schapiro

Before the Eiffel was out and out

Seurat painted it like a way

The top was a collection of vapor the skin was a dot

And like a stark naked the whole was in doubt.

The canopy of heaven had no electric bulb.

But the canopy of heaven was an electric bulb

For those who saw it,clearly with a-frame

And gaped a window, but without a name.

And Meyer Schaprio

saw it all

In conte crayons in the

caricatural fall.

The woman who pos was

a tower too.

Long before the

drawing drew

And Daniel Shapiro

went to the de Young

When he too

could hardly be called young.

He saw the Eiffel

in r and sapphirine

In a reaching far down case

without a postcard

view.

Drew my attention

to the small undressed

of the Eiffel Tower

in its mad grove

Like a bird in

the spume

like a fish

in the deluge

Like a medieval

song transposed

by the mind.

We've not to be found it

again, like

Greek monody.

All we have is

a somber xerox transcript

Oh Eiffel Tower

Oh Sonia Delaunay

with elephantiasis

unto our day.

Let the stet stand,

let the series be

as long as the

speckled tower

And all the repose

is money.

In that hundred

we will be

happily blind.

Standing in like an iridescent wind.

The Eiffel

was nothing on the other hand numbers

like a discourse

by Plato

Now you may misspell

misspelling

Now you may clutch your

organ like the

hero Balzac

Now you may be accused

of renting alone

a house that uncloses

opens onto the Eiffel

and a dog upon a

leash that bursts

into a light scaly bud

Crack open

the way

break the

concrete

It is distance;

it is near.

Only the junk

of the day remains,

only the top of the

peak, the poetics

of engineering

you will not ever reach

in everyday life:

our seminary

In the picnic

on the peak,

a bridge away from

the disappearing mystique.

Oh and the lower

corner bears water

like Brooklyn

the sky-colored sky's name.

And a dark Lethe no doubt a transcript

Ran like an academic stream filled with candy.

His father was the one-armed bailiff.

But the Tower was as vigorous as a shellfish.

Copyright World metrical composition Incorporated May/Jun 1999

Provided by the agency of ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved