As Parmigianino did it, the right hand | Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer | And swerving easily away, as though to protect | What it advertises. A few leaded panes, old beams, | Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together | In a movement supporting the face, which swims | Toward and away like the hand | Except that it is in repose. It is what is | Sequestered. Vasari says, "Francesco one day set himself | To take his own portrait, looking at himself for that purpose | In a convex mirror, such as is used by barbers . . . | He accordingly caused a ball of wood to be made | By a turner, and having divided it in half and | Brought it to the size of the mirror, he set himself | With great art to copy all that he saw in the glass," | Chiefly his reflection, of which the portrait | Is the reflection once removed. | The glass chose to reflect only what he saw | Which was enough for his purpose: his image | Glazed, embalmed, projected at a 180-degree angle. | The time of day or the density of the light | Adhering to the face keeps it | Lively and intact in a recurring wave | Of arrival. The soul establishes itself. | But how far can it swim out through the eyes | And still return safely to its nest? The surface | Of the mirror being convex, the distance increases | Significantly; that is, enough to make the point | That the soul is a captive, treated humanely, kept |  In suspension, unable to advance much farther | Than your look as it intercepts the picture. | Pope Clement and his court were "stupefied" | By it, according to Vasari, and promised a commission | That never materialized. The soul has to stay where it is, | Even though restless, hearing raindrops at the pane, | The sighing of autumn leaves thrashed by the wind, | Longing to be free, outside, but it must stay | Posing in this place. It must move | As little as possible. This is what the portrait says. | But there is in that gaze a combination | Of tenderness, amusement and regret, so powerful | In its restraint that one cannot look for long. | The secret is too plain. The pity of it smarts, | Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul, | Has no secret, is small, and it fits | Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention. | That is the tune but there are no words. | The words are only speculation | (From the Latin speculum, mirror): | They seek and cannot find the meaning of the music. | We see only postures of the dream, | Riders of the motion that swings the face | Into view under evening skies, with no | False disarray as proof of authenticity. | But it is life englobed. | One would like to stick one's hand | Out of the globe, but its dimension, | What carries it, will not allow it. | No doubt it is this, not the reflex | To hide something, which makes the hand loom large | As it retreats slightly. There is no way | To build it flat like a section of wall: | It must join the segment of a circle, | Roving back to the body of which it seems | So unlikely a part, to fence in and shore up the face | On which the effort of this condition reads | Like a pinpoint of a smile, a spark | Or star one is not sure of having seen | As darkness resumes. A perverse light whose | Imperative of subtlety dooms in advance its | Conceit to light up: unimportant but meant. | Francesco, your hand is big enough | To wreck the sphere, and too big, | One would think, to weave delicate meshes | That only argue its further detention. | (Big, but not coarse, merely on another scale, | Like a dozing whale on the sea bottom | In relation to the tiny, self-important ship | On the surface.) But your eyes proclaim | That everything is surface. The surface is what's there | And nothing can exist except what's there. | There are no recesses in the room, only alcoves, | And the window doesn't matter much, or that | Sliver of window or mirror on the right, even | As a gauge of the weather, which in French is | Le temps, the word for time, and which | Follows a course wherein changes are merely | Features of the whole. The whole is stable within | Instability, a globe like ours, resting | On a pedestal of vacuum, a ping-pong ball | Secure on its jet of water. | And just as there are no words for the surface, that is, | No words to say what it really is, that it is not | Superficial but a visible core, then there is | No way out of the problem of pathos vs. experience. | You will stay on, restive, serene in | Your gesture which is neither embrace nor warning | But which holds something of both in pure | Affirmation that doesn't affirm anything. |  |  | The balloon pops, the attention | Turns dully away. Clouds | In the puddle stir up into sawtoothed fragments. | I think of the friends | Who came to see me, of what yesterday | Was like. A peculiar slant | Of memory that intrudes on the dreaming model | In the silence of the studio as he considers | Lifting the pencil to the self-portrait. | How many people came and stayed a certain time, | Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you | Like light behind windblown fog and sand, | Filtered and influenced by it, until no part | Remains that is surely you. Those voices in the dusk | Have told you all and still the tale goes on | In the form of memories deposited in irregular | Clumps of crystals. Whose curved hand controls, | Francesco, the turning seasons and the thoughts | That peel off and fly away at breathless speeds | Like the last stubborn leaves ripped | From wet branches? I see in this only the chaos | Of your round mirror which organizes everything | Around the polestar of your eyes which are empty, | Know nothing, dream but reveal nothing. | I feel the carousel starting slowly | And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books, | Photographs of friends, the window and the trees | Merging in one neutral band that surrounds | Me on all sides, everywhere I look. | And I cannot explain the action of leveling, | Why it should all boil down to one | Uniform substance, a magma of interiors. | My guide in these matters is your self, | Firm, oblique, accepting everything with the same | Wraith of a smile, and as time speeds up so that it is soon | Much later, I can know only the straight way out, | The distance between us. Long ago | The strewn evidence meant something, | The small accidents and pleasures | Of the day as it moved gracelessly on, | A housewife doing chores. Impossible now | To restore those properties in the silver blur that is | The record of what you accomplished by sitting down | "With great art to copy all that you saw in the glass" | So as to perfect and rule out the extraneous | Forever. In the circle of your intentions certain spars | Remain that perpetuate the enchantment of self with self: | Eyebeams, muslin, coral. It doesn't matter | Because these are things as they are today | Before one's shadow ever grew | Out of the field into thoughts of tomorrow. |  | Tomorrow is easy, but today is uncharted, | Desolate, reluctant as any landscape | To yield what are laws of perspective | After all only to the painter's deep | Mistrust, a weak instrument though | Necessary. Of course some things | Are possible, it knows, but it doesn't know | Which ones. Some day we will try | To do as many things as are possible | And perhaps we shall succeed at a handful | Of them, but this will not have anything | To do with what is promised today, our | Landscape sweeping out from us to disappear | On the horizon. Today enough of a cover burnishes | To keep the supposition of promises together | In one piece of surface, letting one ramble | Back home from them so that these | Even stronger possibilities can remain | Whole without being tested. Actually | The skin of the bubble-chamber's as tough as | Reptile eggs; everything gets "programmed" there | In due course: more keeps getting included | Without adding to the sum, and just as one | Gets accustomed to a noise that | Kept one awake but now no longer does, | So the room contains this flow like an hourglass | Without varying in climate or quality | (Except perhaps to brighten bleakly and almost | Invisibly, in a focus sharpening toward death—more | Of this later). What should be the vacuum of a dream | Becomes continually replete as the source of dreams | Is being tapped so that this one dream | May wax, flourish like a cabbage rose, | Defying sumptuary laws, leaving us | To awake and try to begin living in what | Has now become a slum. Sydney Freedberg in his | Parmigianino says of it: "Realism in this portrait | No longer produces an objective truth, but a bizarria. . | However its distortion does not create | A feeling of disharmony. . . . The forms retain | A strong measure of ideal beauty," because | Fed by our dreams, so inconsequential until one day | We notice the hole they left. Now their importance | If not their meaning is plain. They were to nourish | A dream which includes them all, as they are | Finally reversed in the accumulating mirror. | They seemed strange because we couldn't actually see them. | And we realize this only at a point where they lapse | Like a wave breaking on a rock, giving up | Its shape in a gesture which expresses that shape. | The forms retain a strong measure of ideal beauty | As they forage in secret on our idea of distortion. | Why be unhappy with this arrangement, since | Dreams prolong us as they are absorbed? | Something like living occurs, a movement | Out of the dream into its codification. |  | As I start to forget it | It presents its stereotype again | But it is an unfamiliar stereotype, the face | Riding at anchor, issued from hazards, soon | To accost others, "rather angel than man" (Vasari). |  Perhaps an angel looks like everything | We have forgotten, I mean forgotten | Things that don't seem familiar when | We meet them again, lost beyond telling, | Which were ours once. This would be the point | Of invading the privacy of this man who | "Dabbled in alchemy, but whose wish | Here was not to examine the subtleties of art | In a detached, scientific spirit: he wished through them | To impart the sense of novelty and amazament to the | spectator" | (Freedberg). Later portraits such as the Uffizi | "Gentleman," the Borghese "Young Prelate" and | The Naples "Antea" issue from Mannerist | Tensions, but here, as Freedberg points out, | The surprise, the tension are in the concept | Rather than its realization. | The consonance of the High Renaissance | Is present, though distorted by the mirror. | What is novel is the extreme care in rendering | The velleities of the rounded reflecting surface | (It is the first mirror portrait), | So that you could be fooled for a moment | Before you realize the reflection | Isn't yours. You feel then like one of those | Hoffmann characters who have been deprived | Of a reflection, except that the whole of me | Is seen to be supplanted by the strict | Otherness of the painter in his | Other room. We have surprised him | At work, but no, he has surprised us | As he works. The picture is almost finished, | The surprise almost over, as when one looks out, Startled by a snowfall which even now is | Ending in specks and sparkles of snow. | It happened while you were inside, asleep, | And there is no reason why you should have | Been awake for it, except that the day | Is ending and it will be hard for you | To get to sleep tonight, at least until late. |  | The shadow of the city injects its own | Urgency: Rome where Francesco | Was at work during the Sack: his inventions | Amazed the soldiers who burst in on him; | They decided to spare his life, but he left soon after; | Vienna where the painting is today, where | I saw it with Pierre in the summer of 1959; New York | Where I am now, which is a logarithm | Of other cities. Our landscape | Is alive with filiations, shuttlings; | Business is carried on by look, gesture, | Hearsay. It is another life to the city, | The backing of the looking glass of the | Unidentified but precisely sketched studio. It wants | To siphon off the life of the studio, deflate | Its mapped space to enactments, island it. | That operation has been temporarily stalled | But something new is on the way, a new preciosity | In the wind. Can you stand it, | Francesco? Are you strong enough for it? | This wind brings what it knows not, is | Self-propelled, blind, has no notion | Of itself. It is inertia that once | Acknowledged saps all activity, secret or public: | Whispers of the word that can't be understood | But can be felt, a chill, a blight | Moving outward along the capes and peninsulas | Of your nervures and so to the archipelagoes | And to the bathed, aired secrecy of the open sea. | This is its negative side. Its positive side is | Making you notice life and the stresses | That only seemed to go away, but now, | As this new mode questions, are seen to be |  Hastening out of style. If they are to become classics | They must decide which side they are on. | Their reticence has undermined | The urban scenery, made its ambiguities | Look willful and tired, the games of an old man. | What we need now is this unlikely | Challenger pounding on the gates of an amazed | Castle. Your argument, Francesco, | Had begun to grow stale as no answer | Or answers were forthcoming. If it dissolves now | Into dust, that only means its time had come | Some time ago, but look now, and listen: | It may be that another life is stocked there | In recesses no one knew of; that it, | Not we, are the change; that we are in fact it | If we could get back to it, relive some of the way | It looked, turn our faces to the globe as it sets | And still be coming out all right: | Nerves normal, breath normal. Since it is a metaphor | Made to include us, we are a part of it and | Can live in it as in fact we have done, | Only leaving our minds bare for questioning | We now see will not take place at random | But in an orderly way that means to menace | Nobody—the normal way things are done, | Like the concentric growing up of days | Around a life: correctly, if you think about it. |  | A breeze like the turning of a page | Brings back your face: the moment | Takes such a big bite out of the haze | Of pleasant intuition it comes after. | The locking into place is "death itself," | As Berg said of a phrase in Mahler's Ninth; | Or, to quote Imogen in Cymbeline, "There cannot | Be a pinch in death more sharp than this," for, | Though only exercise or tactic, it carries | The momentum of a conviction that had been building. | Mere forgetfulness cannot remove it | Nor wishing bring it back, as long as it remains | The white precipitate of its dream | In the climate of sighs flung across our world, | A cloth over a birdcage. But it is certain that | What is beautiful seems so only in relation to a specific | Life, experienced or not, channeled into some form | Steeped in the nostalgia of a collective past. | The light sinks today with an enthusiasm | I have known elsewhere, and known why | It seemed meaningful, that others felt this way | Years ago. I go on consulting | This mirror that is no longer mine | For as much brisk vacancy as is to be | My portion this time. And the vase is always full | Because there is only just so much room | And it accommodates everything. The sample | One sees is not to be taken as | Merely that, but as everything as it | May be imagined outside time—not as a gesture | But as all, in the refined, assimilable state. | But what is this universe the porch of | As it veers in and out, back and forth, | Refusing to surround us and still the only | Thing we can see? Love once | Tipped the scales but now is shadowed, invisible, | Though mysteriously present, around somewhere. | But we know it cannot be sandwiched | Between two adjacent moments, that its windings | Lead nowhere except to further tributaries | And that these empty themselves into a vague | Sense of something that can never be known | Even though it seems likely that each of us | Knows what it is and is capable of | Communicating it to the other. But the look | Some wear as a sign makes one want to |  Push forward ignoring the apparent | Naivete of the attempt, not caring | That no one is listening, since the light | Has been lit once and for all in their eyes | And is present, unimpaired, a permanent anomaly, | Awake and silent. On the surface of it | There seems no special reason why that light | Should be focused by love, or why | The city falling with its beautiful suburbs | Into space always less clear, less defined, | Should read as the support of its progress, | The easel upon which the drama unfolded | To its own satisfaction and to the end | Of our dreaming, as we had never imagined | It would end, in worn daylight with the painted | Promise showing through as a gage, a bond. | This nondescript, never-to-be defined daytime is | The secret of where it takes place | And we can no longer return to the various | Conflicting statements gathered, lapses of memory | Of the principal witnesses. All we know | Is that we are a little early, that | Today has that special, lapidary | Todayness that the sunlight reproduces | Faithfully in casting twig-shadows on blithe | Sidewalks. No previous day would have been like this. | I used to think they were all alike, | That the present always looked the same to everybody | But this confusion drains away as one | Is always cresting into one's present. | Yet the "poetic," straw-colored space | Of the long corridor that leads back to the painting, | Its darkening opposite—is this | Some figment of "art," not to be imagined | As real, let alone special? Hasn't it too its lair | In the present we are always escaping from | And falling back into, as the waterwheel of days |  Pursues its uneventful, even serene course? | I think it is trying to say it is today | And we must get out of it even as the public | Is pushing through the museum now so as to | Be out by closing time. You can't live there. | The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how: | Secrets of wash and finish that took a lifetime | To learn and are reduced to the status of | Black-and-white illustrations in a book where colorplates | Are rare. That is, all time | Reduces to no special time. No one | Alludes to the change; to do so might | Involve calling attention to oneself | Which would augment the dread of not getting out | Before having seen the whole collection | (Except for the sculptures in the basement: | They are where they belong). | Our time gets to be veiled, compromised | By the portrait's will to endure. It hints at | Our own, which we were hoping to keep hidden. | We don't need paintings or | Doggerel written by mature poets when | The explosion is so precise, so fine. | Is there any point even in acknowledging | The existence of all that? Does it | Exist? Certainly the leisure to | Indulge stately pastimes doesn't, | Any more. Today has no margins, the event arrives | Flush with its edges, is of the same substance, | Indistinguishable. "Play" is something else; | It exists, in a society specifically | Organized as a demonstration of itself. | There is no other way, and those assholes | Who would confuse everything with their mirror games | Which seem to multiply stakes and possibilities, or | At least confuse issues by means of an investing | Aura that would corrode the architecture |  Of the whole in a haze of suppressed mockery, | Are beside the point. They are out of the game, | Which doesn't exist until they are out of it. | It seems like a very hostile universe | But as the principle of each individual thing is | Hostile to, exists at the expense of all the others | As philosophers have often pointed out, at least | This thing, the mute, undivided present, | Has the justification of logic, which | In this instance isn't a bad thing | Or wouldn't be, if the way of telling | Didn't somehow intrude, twisting the end result | Into a caricature of itself. This always | Happens, as in the game where | A whispered phrase passed around the room | Ends up as something completely different. | It is the principle that makes works of art so unlike | What the artist intended. Often he finds | He has omitted the thing he started out to say | In the first place. Seduced by flowers, | Explicit pleasures, he blames himself (though | Secretly satisfied with the result), imagining | He had a say in the matter and exercised | An option of which he was hardly conscious, | Unaware that necessity circumvents such resolutions. | So as to create something new | For itself, that there is no other way, | That the history of creation proceeds according to | Stringent laws, and that things | Do get done in this way, but never the things | We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately | To see come into being. Parmigianino | Must have realized this as he worked at his | Life-obstructing task. One is forced to read | The perfectly plausible accomplishment of a purpose | Into the smooth, perhaps even bland (but so | Enigmatic) finish. Is there anything |  To be serious about beyond this otherness | That gets included in the most ordinary | Forms of daily activity, changing everything | Slightly and profoundly, and tearing the matter | Of creation, any creation, not just artistic creation | Out of our hands, to install it on some monstrous, near | Peak, too close to ignore, too far | For one to intervene? This otherness, this | "Not-being-us" is all there is to look at | In the mirror, though no one can say | How it came to be this way. A ship | Flying unknown colors has entered the harbor. | You are allowing extraneous matters | To break up your day, cloud the focus | Of the crystal ball. Its scene drifts away | Like vapor scattered on the wind. The fertile | Thought-associations that until now came | So easily, appear no more, or rarely. Their | Colorings are less intense, washed out | By autumn rains and winds, spoiled, muddied, | Given back to you because they are worthless. | Yet we are such creatures of habit that their | Implications are still around en permanence, confusing | Issues. To be serious only about sex | Is perhaps one way, but the sands are hissing | As they approach the beginning of the big slide | Into what happened. This past | Is now here: the painter's | Reflected face, in which we linger, receiving | Dreams and inspirations on an unassigned | Frequency, but the hues have turned metallic, | The curves and edges are not so rich. Each person | Has one big theory to explain the universe | But it doesn't tell the whole story | And in the end it is what is outside him | That matters, to him and especially to us | Who have been given no help whatever |  In decoding our own man-size quotient and must rely | On second-hand knowledge. Yet I know | That no one else's taste is going to be | Any help, and might as well be ignored. | Once it seemed so perfect—gloss on the fine | Freckled skin, lips moistened as though about to part | Releasing speech, and the familiar look | Of clothes and furniture that one forgets. | This could have been our paradise: exotic | Refuge within an exhausted world, but that wasn't | In the cards, because it couldn't have been | The point. Aping naturalness may be the first step | Toward achieving an inner calm | But it is the first step only, and often | Remains a frozen gesture of welcome etched | On the air materializing behind it, | A convention. And we have really | No time for these, except to use them | For kindling. The sooner they are burnt up | The better for the roles we have to play. | Therefore I beseech you, withdraw that hand, | Offer it no longer as shield or greeting, | The shield of a greeting, Francesco: | There is room for one bullet in the chamber: | Our looking through the wrong end | Of the telescope as you fall back at a speed | Faster than that of light to flatten ultimately | Among the features of the room, an invitation | Never mailed, the "it was all a dream" | Syndrome, though the "all" tells tersely | Enough how it wasn't. Its existence | Was real, though troubled, and the ache | Of this waking dream can never drown out | The diagram still sketched on the wind, | Chosen, meant for me and materialized | In the disguising radiance of my room. | We have seen the city; it is the gibbous |  Mirrored eye of an insect. All things happen | On its balcony and are resumed within, | But the action is the cold, syrupy flow | Of a pageant. One feels too confined, | Sifting the April sunlight for clues, | In the mere stillness of the ease of its | Parameter. The hand holds no chalk | And each part of the whole falls off | And cannot know it knew, except | Here and there, in cold pockets | Of remembrance, whispers out of time.