A Pair of Sonnets on Marcel Duchamp, by Eric Fretz

The Large Glass Completed, by Marcel Duchamp (France). 1965.

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), by Marcel Duchamp (France). 1915-1923.

La Mariée Mise à Nu par ses Célibataires, Meme
 
Oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust
on two glass panels. Mechanics of lust
drawn like blueprints of the impossible 
design, transparent but impassible.
Nine flat malic molds, or Eros Matrix
(Duchamp played tricks like a dominatrix), 

The bachelor apparatus: a pain
of glass that sits below the bride’s domain,
all cut off from the tarot’s hangman bride,
the open space where meaning would abide.
Freestanding, over nine feet tall, you move,
it’s still, the “runners sliding in a grove.”

It won’t tell why, or what will come to pass.
So why should I write clearly of this glass?
 
The Large Glass

If every line’s a fragment of a thought
that links up to the next, all leading to
completion, it does not reflect our age.
But we should not reflect, like mirrors wrought
and polished, just to disappear. Sing, you,
of objects in themselves, or turn the page:
                                                                                                                                         
A wave goodbye. A great white wave capsized
this text, and settled down. Let’s see a swan
float now, where that whale had been, metaphor
or not, but questioning what we surmised
was next, like colors in the ripples, drawn
in feeble memory. Stood on the floor,  

the glass is cracked, the dust has settled there. 
The bride is gone. The frame is everywhere.

Eric Fretz

Eric Fretz has been a student of contemporary visual arts since they were modern, and not contemporary, and a long time reader of modern poetry. He is a published author of art criticism and history, but has only recently been persuaded to share his ekphrastic writing exercises. He divides his time between Brooklyn and Beacon, New York, and between art and politics.