Albrecht Dürer’s Knight, Death, and Devil, by Jennifer Martelli

The Knight, Death, and the Devil, by Albrecht Durer (Germany). 1513.

Albrecht Dürer’s Knight, Death, and Devil

The whole night was a Dürer etching.
I wore my rabbit fur coat.
 
On Knight, Death, and Devil, Borges wrote:
There are two ways to open:
 
one of them is nasty, one of them
is short. The night was a triptych.
 
Even I couldn’t believe it hadn’t been
painted onto the black and green sky, onto my blue
 
melancholy baby body.
I couldn’t believe night was etched
 
with a cold
chisel on copper. The night was Teutonic,
 
oblique, and practical: seek grace, Albrecht urged, you may die
at any moment. ​

Jennifer Martelli
​
Jennifer Martelli’s debut poetry collection, The Uncanny Valley, was published in 2016 by Big Table Publishing Company. She is also the author of After Bird from Grey Book Press. Her work has appeared in Thrush, [Pank], Glass Poetry Journal, Cleaver, The Heavy Feather Review, Italian Americana, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Jennifer Martelli has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net Prizes and is the recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry. She is a book reviewer for Up the Staircase Quarterly and Ovunque Siamo, as well as the co-curator for The Mom Egg VOX Folio.