Max Beckman
One night, staring
down the length
of a cigarette
into the tides of broken bodies
and burning
men
I saw the twisted
figures cohere
in the yellow light
of the trenches
and the stainless steel tables
of the makeshift morgue.
. . .One year later , discharged
with "hallucinations"
I spent a season in the Alps
reading Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
In 1917
I painted "The Night."
--An homage to the figures
of suffering without sense
and the monsters of calumny
that bleed through their bandages
and are all the more monstrous
for being ordinary . . . .
I felt it was my work
to paint the evil. . . .
The hideous throbbing demons
of our vital energy. . .
In a violence of the senses
and a labor of the eyes.
2.
The rose of blood
is the rose of history.
Ever -twisted, each view
suggests a reason for hope
against the carnage on every side
of our hidden destiny.
. . . . I only wanted to paint
beautiful pictures. . . .
. . . .Instead, I painted
The Hell of The birds . . . .
In Amsterdam
As the Reich was fuming
And the wind smelled of cordite
and Europe burned,
And I wound myself through the sewers of the world
To rid my mind of these confounded torments.
3.
Ah, a sadness,
as of a crinoline
Smeared with blood
and shit
Sighing in the wind,
like the chorus
Of victims
of the Entartete Kunst
Where light implored
the outer darkness,
For a moment,
not to burn.
And the wind was the wind.
And the silence said nothing.
