Temporarily Closed

Ida O'Keefe
Lighthouse

Temporarily Closed


It's a rare Brueghel without people.

                                               Richard Hugo
                                               Brueghel in the Doria

Times like these maybe we go back and maybe we are made
to go back and wish we'd asked the man or woman we can't

remember which but we remember ignoring the one on the floor
of the great gallery we should have asked just what was he trying to get

at see that slip
of shade and the way

a bird this bird of literal
paradise has taken

to the air in foreboding, see
and we know this only

for Brueghel naming it Paradise Landscape with the Fall of Man
see the bird above the people, there, see it take toward the upper

branches of the Do
Not Touch Tree and Eve

and Adam are really supposed
to be the key players here but

they're so small
they're almost

insignificant almost
people-

less.  Maybe if you had the ear of the docent who's trained an eye
away from the painting and instead has to be the lioness in the fore-

ground with her
lifted paw, or

has to be the muscled
lungs of the horse

or has to be
the bored

leopard licking
and licking...

My instincts tell me it ends here or that it should end here because
they're all gone - all of them - and these Breughels

that Hugo saw
once are now

what's among
the chaff of

the unseen and I
wonder because

both men, Hugo and Breughl I mean liked to catch an instant 
in mid air: a lifted skirt, a leg in the distant water, the arc

of a stone
in the poem

before the one
about Breughel

how it covers all
the years between

Tiberius and today and all those seven seconds they say it took
for all his enemies to go to pulp on the stones below.  Today

it's the galleries
that are closed

and the cliffs are
eager for feet.

Today we open
books  we open

packages of stale
crackers we open

old molds of cheese
and scrape them

clean of their quiet
snowflake shapes, today

we people our own brain with the kibble we've finally taken
the time to unzip from the burlap sack of our meninges, from our hoarded

stores.  Are we
more humble now?

Will we thumb
each separate piece

and bring it to
our lips

and let it
open us will we say

sweet God how long
have I walked

under such a bough
as this and never

once begged
or been begged

to reach to touch to fall on my knees to lullaby the resisting skin to OH GOD bite?