My three favorite death paintings: Blake’s Great Red
Dragon and the Beast of the Sea, a more viciously
potent duo you never saw, and Bacon’s Study after
Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X, all vertical slashes
as if Innocent were being lifted into a draft of terrifying
impermanence, and Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son,
one of his “black paintings,” the ghastly white little body
limp and shining out of the gloom, head already gone.
But what do I know of this vast subject in art, and
for that matter, what did the swan know, who came
huge, sudden as if straight at me, muscular wingtips
skimming the water until it was even with me a few
feet out, stretched out, mad with concentration,
prying the sky apart as it passed, what did either of us
know of our end except what we make of it in our
separate minds that cry into the gloaming we long
to outrun, or paint safely down? Or gather up a word
or two to cover the situation, this is what I do, happily
do, by the way, which is why I recall with such frisson
turning on the dock, coming face-to-face with the subject
bearing down, and why I stood right there on the end
with my glass of wine, and the kind of unconscious smile
I imagine a hunter might get at the movement of leaves.