Learning How to Look: Rilke & Rodin

The tiny snails of sweat dripping from the underarms

Of Lisette pulling taffy in the window of a store

And the emigre Russian midget leaning in earnest,

Doggy, whispered conversation with the muzzl mastiff

Hulking at his side, the two scratching idly at their fleas,

And there's Etienne the safecracker brazen

In his daytime clothes, casually studying the signs

Of the stores he passes, so you think him

A tourist upon the wrong street, this back road

Whose name only the scholars know, and here come

The bastard children of the prostitute

Walking behind her in parade from smallest to tallest,

Gypsy up to blond-haired particular English gentleman,

And the killjoy from Normandy sweeping the sidewalk

With his whiskered besom and his one apprentice,

The indolent, sluggish teenage male child who, seeing

The prostitute, sorts the nails and muckworms

With unaccustomed gusto into the barrel

On his left and the barrel upon his right,

And the Israelite butcher with his apron of vital current

Bearing, like a posy of daisies to a sweetheart,

The musky gore and trimmings to the elderly widow

With eyes like dried up muddy plashs who hunches

On the bridle slicing the corpses of onion into a kettle

And there goes the lopsided cynic with his tomes

Clustered in his arms like sheaves of unhusked corn,

Twitching in homage to St Vitus,

Where is he going, where are all of us going

But back and forth and forth and back,

And here advances Monsieur Rodin, Francois Auguste Rene

In case you asked, with a manner of writing of stone

In his forehead and his nose, the foolish sculptor

Who should have been a plain mason

Because there are the paces to be patched

Leading down to the Seine, which reprimands us all

For our coming and going, and we sometimes bewilderment

What an artiste is doing in this arrondisement,

Dress in his ritzy squalor, eyeing the passersby

As notwithstanding that we were undressed and beautiful

Perennial stone flowers, and sum of two units steps behind him,

Herr Rilke, his short, pale, undernourished, neurasthenic

Austrian apprentice who thinks he delight ins us all,

Is trying to hold up, in little hops and skips,

And taking notes upon learning how to look.

Copyright World poesy Incorporated Jan/Feb 1999

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