THE HEARING FOREST
(to
Hieronymus Bosch)
‘Oh this world is a waggon of hay
and
everyone grabs what they can.
Be
you Philip the Handsome or the rag and bone man,
you’ll
sink like a toad in a vat of dismay.’
Jereon
or Jheronimus,
Jerome
or Hieronymus,
El
Bosco or Bosch,
the
crackle of your piercing laugh
crawls
across this busybody city of your’s;
subverts
the barrel organ’s clanking tunes
and
the melancholic cackle of a demon priest.
This
dark Carnival of frogs and trombones,
leaps
from the graves of beggars and cripples;
this
dualist fantasy,
this
Oeteldonk nightmare,
where
even the sewer rats dance
and
the River Dieze drinks to high heaven.
I
once saw a man who looked like you,
staring
at me like a hag of a gargoyle
at
the bar of the Bonte Palet.
He
was a dribbling grotesque,
the
kind you find among the monsters and workmen astride St. Jan’s.
A
member, no doubt, of Our Lady’s Brotherhood,
he
lived in a dream world,
a
glutton for punishment,
ogling
a lusty Brabant girl
with
his popping, panting, eyes.
He
was throwing genevers down his throbbing canal,
drinking
at the confluence of Dommel and Aa;
he
had brown paint on his hands so I knew it was you,
Master
of Alla Prima.
The
next time I dreamt I saw you smile,
I
was floating in Venice in a boat of lost souls.
And
your face shone from a passing cloud
as
I lay back and drank-in the scum and the sky.
Pray
tell me, El Bosco,
what
are these chambers of rhetoric for?
Why
do the organ builders and bell founders scrape?
You
with the heavens in your eyes,
was
there a God between Aleyt Goyaertsvan den Meervenne’s thighs?
All
this sin,
eternal
damnation of lost souls;
in
McDonald’s, I see scenes of horrendous torture,
galleries
of carnal mutilations,
and,
in the Market Square, there are stalls from Hell,
there
are poets,
drunk
in the sinister depths of imagination,
who
should be eaten alive
by
bureaucrats.
Oh
paradox-riddled Jerome,
‘Master
of the monstrous,
discoverer
of the unconscious’,
I
am sick with life,
scraping
my shoes full of lice
along
the dark slabs of Stoofstraat.
On
my last night in ‘t-Hertogenbosch,
on
my last fucking cockroach legs,
I
slid my painter’s hand up a posh lady’s dress;
with
musical demons
gabbling
around us,
I
plucked her devil’s fruit
like
the strings of an evil lute.
And
I prayed and I prayed and I prayed
to
rid myself of the adders and dragons
that
scorched like Hades
in
my screaming heart.
‘Oh
this world is a waggon of hay
and
everyone grabs what they can.
Be
you Philip the Handsome or the rag and bone man,
you’ll
sink like a toad in a vat of dismay.’
Oh
Jheronimus, Jheronimus please,
please
take me to the Seeing Field.
I
want my bones and my flesh to burn
to
set this starving Spirit free
in
the Hearing Forest.
Keith Armstrong
THE STATUE OF HIERONYMUS BOSCH
Look down Hieronymus:
the
blonde kids dancing at your feet;
barrel
organs churning songs out
against
your deaf and cheesed-off ears.
Blink
blind, stone eyes,
cobble
cheeks,
dig
the electric pleasure garden,
frame
the nuclear canal
and
sigh you weary statue you.
Chipped
cloak,
cold
painter’s
nose
drips with rain.
Drunk,
we piss on the past,
slash
and splash against the dark canvas.
Bosch,
we still play the games.
I
catch an angel barmaid’s eye
and
swallow the blueness of it
in
my aching head.
Beauty
lodges overnight in the skull.
Unlucky
Hieronymus:
missiles
haloing your frown of a brow;
clouds
crashing over the market square.
They’re
building the greatest nightmare ever around you,
but
your hands have grown too stiff to paint.
Keith Armstrong
