Dverse offered this painting by Magritte as a prompt this evening.
Looking through the wrong mirror
Are they clouds in your eyes or the clear sky beyond?
Do you hear the sweep of wings or the falling rain?
There are questions in every unopened drawer,
behind the unfurling leaves of every tree,
but the answers drift, unmoored, unanchored,
in the eternal dark at the back of beyond.
Another version of the Magritte ekphrastic poem for dverse. An ottavo rima.
Pyrénées unbound
Mountains have no roots, their sleep no dreams,
no limits to ambition’s flight, no sky
binds up their clouded heads in misty streams,
as silver-sleek as salmon. Eagles fly
beneath their feet that tread where no light gleams.
In lava veins of fire-blood run dry
as desert dust, the salamanders roar,
their flames a scarlet wave where cold fish soar.
These eyrie-airy, shale-grey flinted slopes,
bare as bones picked clean, a world askew,
tied to the coping of the sky by feathered ropes,
hover weightless where no kestrel ever flew.
A dwelling squats, claw-spread and high as hopes,
stone tossed on stone, a Babel in the blue
of oceans, where grey-scaled fishes sing
the wind, the world unmoored, a broken wing.
For dverse
Rene’ Magritte, Belgian, 1898-1967
Le Château des Pyrénées (The Castle of the Pyrenees), 1959
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Pyrénées
Mountains have no roots dreams
ambition no limits
sometimes they float hover
fish-birds
where oceans roll
and clouds cloak their rocky scales
in mystery
building their châteaux
grey-flint and shale
aloft awash awoken
becalmed in the bird’s-nest
anchorage of the sky.
The Four Swans 