On a sculpture by Herbert Adams.(Poem)

American Beauty Exhibition, National Gallery, Dublin, 2002

 
                       I 
 
The precise anger in your eyes, last night, 
Seemed for the first time and, perhaps, the last, 
To cut through every fold of charm, and sight 
In me the wrinkled cloths and ragged past. 
"For too long now," you said, "I've thought you were 
Not perfect but, at least, what you said you were." 
 
This afternoon, expatriated from 
Our homes, our images, our veritable selves, 
We neither speak nor touch. The gallery's hum 
Of scrubbed dry air, and the exhibited wealths 
Preserve our silence: artificial world, 
Where what you said distills, abstract and cold. 
 
You stare at the volcanic Cotopaxi, 
Those oils flooding toward apocalypse. 
But that, or any sublime scene, turns warily 
On our few months abroad as they collapse. 
I go--from work to work, continue down, 
Till my thoughts rest upon a girl of stone: 
 
                    II 
 
Her marble eyes, up close, are clumsy things, 
Vertical scratches form an iris, light 
Brushwork of paint upon them browns to bring 
Definition amid the consummate 
Polish of a pale and laminant cheek, 
Whose model sat for Adams one snow-locked week. 
 
But from a middle-distance, eye and neck, 
Flowering cheek and pied jewelry, 
Her unmoved glistening lips seem to enact, 
In cold perfection, warm reality. 
Did that young lady on her sculpture stare 
Preferring it to her face in a mirror? 
 
This piece, some fifty others from Detroit, 
Like us have come to Dublin for a time, 
And looking on them here gives each a slight 
Neighborly kinship we would never find 
If we walked by them in that old museum's 
Brusque familiarity of home. 
 
                  III 
 
For Adams and his peers the trade of art 
Must itself have seemed an imported idea: 
Imposing, calcified in unseen thoughts 
Of thorned peaks of the Swiss Alps rupturing far 
Above the folded skin of clouds. They ripened 
Borrowed fantasies to an archetype. 
 
That Boston heiress gathered up the lot 
To furnish her covenant of Italian stone. 
Her gardens flourish near old pictures bought 
From needy seigneurs in a rotting Rome. 
For that servile gift she will be ...