Works on Paper

1

It opens as a long lamplit evening

with Rembrandt, stretched out with the glossy book

of his Works on Paper. Brown-petal etchings and drawings:

nut-brown, browner, irreclaimable rills

of iron-gall ink sucked and feathered into

the paper's wan cusps and culverts. The ink...it's as if

there's no pulling away from the wet, flowing line

to the tiny hedge-village perched on the edge of the cliff

and the paper. Here the ink's overwatered

and we barely, down in the forested loam,

disengage the gentle saint, his rounded hat molding

his crown like thatch on low rooftrees...St. Jerome.

                                     2

Hunched, sunk in a deep-toned wash,

he cares only for the huge, softleaved book

propped on his knees. At nightfall Jerome swallowed up

by his Bible misses the wistful look

of his lion withdrawn to the forested ridge,

the drawing's diagonal. And from there, one can say

that landscape exists: prowls and spinnies

where a lion might wind a lioness, or his prey...

He looks out on tree-clouded peaks, tiny hamlets,

two lambs in a wattle-fold. What the lion sees, we see.

For Jerome, though, the lion is Judah, his seal and seed—

Jesse's stem drops thickset leaves for him to read.

                                     3

Saskia, of course, thrones in painting. Still,

tiny sketches tumble from odd cabinets:

the dear in a lopsided turban or twilled

garden hat, sketched "on my wedding-day"—

Saskia. A cluster of lines, a rippled race

of curls and cloudsets. And, for a rarity,

in Rembrandt, flowers. The simple, surprised, smiling face

of Saskia as Flora...After her fourth lying-in

(she was dying), he took to long walks

on the city's outskirts; his sketchbook came home

with mere touches of charcoal, a reed, a waterfowl,

estuarial shallows unfolding to the rim.

                                     4

Now life is meaner, chaotic. Rushes of arousal,

lawsuits, debts...this print of a kitchen drab,

eyes wandering, mouth a vacant, uptilted half-lune,

her work-swollen hands on Saskia's velvet shawl,

The thighs parted, abdomen pear-pendulant,

the pulled-off stocking-stays grooved in the flab

to her copse of cross-hatchings—No one

wants to see this. But his hand made

this stock, of himself the substance and seed. Fine-

spun cosmos, brown tangle, soft sign:

the old man spares us nothing. The book,

the look, the lieu, the end of the Line.