"[The Importance of Artists' Biographies]

was soon so great that the enduring fame of several

[early] Greek artists-Zeuxis and Apelles, to name

two-rests on these biographies alone, without there

having been any possibility of later forming an im-

pression of their actual works."

Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz

The days go by, then more days go by.

We've all seen a lover from fifty feet, and walked up

to a stranger. Though the stars at fifty

light years are clear. The nights go by,

then more nights go by. We've all leapt on

and in a lover, then fifty minutes later rolled

off a stranger. The air goes farther than eyes go

through it, the days and nights are small

collections on a desktop-matchbooks,

knuckle-sized shells, these opened pages of Kris and Kurz-,

a space takes place

between a life and the attributes of a life,

we've all seen it.

Dürer once painted a spider over

a picture by Michelangelo. And a

good few lucid-looking lovers

of art were duped-the threshold having

been lowered between a life and a credible fiction of life,

by a rod, one causative cone, enough

for an otherwise-discerning aficionado to be going

down the gallery in her floorsweeping silks, her hands

on every picture as if they were fruits to be tested,

as if she does this all of the time and with any drawing,

as if, in a crowd of men from the court,

before Michelangelo's gilt-framed sketch she

hadn't especially tried to squash it.

*

And-if Diirer had wholly webbed over

that surface-webbed it to opacity-then

would we know

*

by the broke-nosed, doleful face; the

father's entreaties to turn away from marble, mallets,

mixing-plaques, and the drafty shambles-strewn room;

the nights the Prior allowed him in

with a candle and chalk, to let the flame lick

intermittently up

the legs, the groins, the chestskin now thin as shellac

on the corpses of San Spirito, getting it

down exact; the story of the faked

Sleeping Cupid; the story of the blows with the Pope;

the "great distress of mind and fatigue . . . better

if I had set myself to a cartwright!"; the sonnets,

concerned with absolute beauty opening

like a flower, and the fifteen-year-old boys

he saw as flowers; that, all that, and more, or

just the way the gray veins in his hands' backs

bulged, the only indication of terrible weight, as he rested

his head in the sunstruck floury dust

of the studio, with a mother's gesture of setting her only

child into bed-then

*

would we know to know

the swaths of cloud-borne glow and

galactic deepnesses, the artisan-like

concentration and bunch-muscled effort of God,

in Michelangelo's charcoal rough

for Division of Light from Darkness . . .

would we?

Later, in a garden, the courtiers gone back

to the massive halls of power, she'll look at a

real spider doing the business of spiders

among some stems, and idly wonder: what

*

it must have been, to be the first man-or

maybe she'll think it as woman-to see, to really see,

this creature as itself: a black-backed

stalk-eyed sac-bellied pinch-jawed scuttler on too

many too bristled legs. And would I know,

from that, the nubbin inside

that lets out length after length of this delicate

engineering, this stuff

a bug-gland's-weight away from being pure

filamented sun...

*

She may not be a lady of the court

come out from parrots and cakes, but

my lover

I lifted, I differed away

from any ready semblance, then set down

*

here, on a page, in my study. I recognize

her, though. And you might too if you knew her.

Up in a corner, a spider's spinning this

real web that enters your world

as a word, "web," on a page, "this" page, then

light through a window

lifts the spider as light lifts everything

seeable and brings it, at the same speed

it was just now brought to my eyes,

to the stars.

Science fiction is full of these distances.

Quasar travel. Planet hops.

As if a time warp were stranger than time.

The days go by, then more days go by.

Often the world is hollow, a central, a generating,

civilization lives in the shell. These books surmise

its whip wars with The Lizard Tribe and The Worm,

its celestial ballet when the wings are in season,

the sprigs above its parturition doors, its blood dance,

even the simple distilling of lavender and citron

out of the air at night, by the shore of its inner sea . . .

surmise all this by looking at life

as we know it, our own long neighborhood blocks,

the secrets in laundromats' spins and urgent impressions

on notepads left by the phone-as if a man

could walk this city we live in, stop still at the corner of

Zeuxis and Apelles, think deep, and put some law

of inference to work. For him, the Earth might be a

kind of conceptual crystal, and what we call our

autobiographies would only be refractions of some

original light at the core. We've all had the feeling

he's right. The nights go by, then more nights go by.

We've all seen the faces of lovers in sleep

go somewhere, maybe back to their source, and we

lay by the breathing of strangers. We've all seen

the faces return. I couldn't guess the distance between

a word I write and your reception of it, astronomy

hasn't such measure. But everybody's walked

above the bones of the mothers, the bones of the fathers,

the grandparent bones going back to the magma

heart of it all, through dragon bones, the flightbones

of a pegasus, the first fine organization of grains

of bone in a luminous nucleus . . . There are spaces

so vast, words fail, light fails, though maybe the crossing

is only from a day to another day.

And if the blue look that came over Zeuxis

after one more kylix of that white wine

he washed down the mussels with

meant his

taking the spiral frieze off

that last kylix, as the model for his own gold

opulent coruscations of fruit trees

we'll

never know, will we, we'll never really know.

*

In my study, I come close. There's a print

by Saul Steinberg: a desk, and the objects of its

arrangement: a ruler, a spool of gray thread,

a box of matches, an austere shell with only

the slightest blush of vulva-pink inside it,

a sketchbook opened casually to a nuthatch

done from a pencil's bold strokes, the pencil . . .

*

I take off my glasses, stare at that wall,

I come as close as I can. The desktop

fades to almost never having been.

*

And out of the blurred hints left, I see

as I've seen up there impossibly for years:

an old man on an old burro,

heading heavily toward the right margin.

For years now, heading away

in their own shape, from the shapes of Steinberg's

placing.

It's raining. The old man is

violet, and soft-the kinds of small shadows

worn flannel casts. The burro is weary. It isn't

giving up, though. They're carrying something

-the small tools of a life. Perhaps he's a peddler,

and this is his work, that comes out of

the work of others.

A spider remains in a corner through all of this,

a lover remains in my bed. The night,

the sightless webbed-over night, goes by,

then it's day. It happens that way.

The sketchbook in my Steinberg print is fixed

to a page marked "'nuthatch," fixed unturnably,

though it's day, then it's night, and in a way

time turns that world as I can turn pages

in Kris and Kurz...

An asterisk calls

attention elsewhere. So this is the shape

of a spider, that I've taken off a "real" wall

for this "wall," on this page. It's morning.

A lady I know is still asleep. Light lifts a spider.

Light lifts the lady, and lifts me, though I never move,

and light lifts a spider. The birth of our sun

is first being seen on other planets, a flash

some registerial hand beyond

our understanding duly records. A spider is one

continuous tunnel of being a spider, as long

as light is long, as far; and if the cosmos

curves, a spider returns, at least

a picture of spider returns-as we return, merely

by the saying of that, to Dürer. For him,

it's another morning. He adds one last

perfectionist's dab to the little wiseass joke he's played

in a square inch of Michelangelo. He looks up

now, confused for a moment, confused and exalted,

as if... There are times when we're sensitized to it...

The whole air around him is pictures,

the light is a gallery. Nothing, he sees, can be lost.