After a painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder
Beyond the window Mr Charlie’s friends
are killing stags again while all their pretty,
terrible women watch, hands raised in witty
gestures of mock dismay (for nothing offends
these connoisseurs of carnage) as each beau bends
to fit an arrow into place, shitty
with hubris, or looses a leer he learned in the city
toward the garden his tight-laced mark defends.
As I say, to make it sporting, the men
are wielding crossbows, and the women securely guyed
underthings of many hooks that ride
across citadel bosoms (although now and then
undone by the strain of stooping) or through a fen
as swampy at its source as it is wide
behind—where horsey men have reared and thighed
their tumid way through stress tests one to ten.
Tomorrow’s bloody schedule calls for a go
at boars with pike and blunderbuss. Unless
it rains, destruction will vie anew with an excess
of décolletage, the woods bright with woe
and silver mountings. Washerwomen in a row
will rinse the boars’ blood from the hound’s-tooth, caress
m’lady’s funky drawers, and tunefully undress
each hunter with eyes that whisper, “mon ange, mon gigot.”
If these merciless mammals glanced up the chilly
hillside toward where their castle squats, where sleek
and civil horses rear to the distant squeak
of a motet loud as Charlie, and as silly,
they would see me at my window, belly
pressed against the pane in rosy pique,
as the day falls to pieces like an antique
rebec made long ago in a shop off Piccadilly.
“Stuff and nonsense,” says Charlie, who adds,
“you motto’s ‘live and lose.’” Not true, not true:
I’ve learned to hold my water and to follow through
at golf. I choose the finest gin. I’ve scads
of virtues listed alphabetically on pads.
I do the best I can; indeed, I do
better than that. Tonight, for instance, I’ll debut
Te Deums for staghounds and a chorus of cads.
These pieces will play long after everyone
has dined and danced, and their latest prank’s been played
at my expense: the fleche-courbe-sur-la-tête charade,
the possum fillet I am told is venison
or mutton, the chastity belt toward which I run
with key in hand only to find a shade
of eighty with scanties down and fat legs splayed—
a caprice I’ll score for jaw harp, shawm, and gun.
But when the last trick rose has squirted, and the affair
has ended, I’ll retire to my room to pace,
peruse Dufay rondeaux, and pray for grace.
Then sitting at my table in my only chair,
I’ll compose a sylvan scene of a hunt somewhere
between chastity and bloodshed, a hopeless chase
wherein the gayest huntsman wears my face,
hums “je suis désolé,” and is night’s clear heir.