Four Poems After Paul Klee, by Robert Lowes

General in Charge of the Barbarians, by Paul Klee (Switzerland) 1932

​
​Commander in Chief of the Barbarians 
 
What will you do, steely man,
after your warriors parade
their stained flags 
through the smoking city?
 
Your straight lines
admit to nothing soft,
but orphans wail, and someone
must lay down his sword
 
to learn the local tongue,
the strange machines,
new ways of stacking
stone into walls and towers.
 
And when you’re too old
to ride all day, will you 
pension here? Will your daughters 
mince native dances
 
while you drowse by a fireplace
and its clever, glowing
brickwork, oblivious to the next
shudder of hoofbeats?

Dance of the Moth, by Paul Klee (Switzerland) 1923

Dance of the Moth

A shaft of light impales you.
Over and over, you throw yourself on it.
What good is faith if I pray
 
just on my good days, or bad days?
I crave your constant, reckless spirit.
A shaft of light impales you
 
like a bright Roman nail. You fly
upward to take the hit.
What good is faith if I pray
 
like a moper to get my way
while you get used up, to the last bit?
A shaft of light impales you,
 
but not as a specimen pinned in a tray.
You’re lively as light, on the good foot
of good faith. So I pray
 
to say my prayers the way
the Irish fling, or the hip hop it.
A shaft of light impales you 
good. You’re faith’s glad prey.
 

The Goldfish, by Paul Klee (Switzerland) 1925

The Goldfish

The centre burns with a fish of gold.
Blue-green murk wets its flesh of gold.
 
A body electric, Whitman’s pet,
shocks the dark with a flash of gold.
 
Muted juniors swish to the edges,
fleeing a light so flush with gold.
 
If I touch it, will I shine too,
like a son of fish, refreshed by gold?

Death and Fire, by Paul Klee (Switzerland) 1940

Death and Fire

From Klee’s epitaph: "I cannot be understood
 in purely earthly terms. For I can live 
 as happily with the dead as with the unborn.”
                                                      
Was this another epitaph?
What were you saying
when you painted TOD, 
your native word for death,
on the face of a man 
smiling crookedly in fire,
 
more a skull than face, 
more an oven’s serene
red-yellow glow 
than woodpile blaze,
 
as if you had crematoriums
on your mind in nineteen forty,
the year you died,
just as your persecutors,
who branded you degenerate,
had turned industrialists,
burning entire peoples.
 
Perhaps you were imagining
Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace,
where three faithful men didn’t die.
 
Weren’t you burning inside

walls of hardening skin,
finesse deserting 
your stiffened fingers?
Your brush managed 
rough black lines,
perfect charrings 
for the characters of death,
which you painted twice,
 
once on the ashen mask,
its very eyes and mouth
spelling TOD, and again 
with the man’s upraised
arm and right-angle palm,
a golden orb on top, 
like a nimbus
waiting for its saint, 
the lopsided face itself
forming the final letter.
 
Words live on in the fire.
The smile, however 
mangled, persists. 
And above, in the corner,
a stick figure strolls
into the colorful heat,
as if of its own free will.
 
You might be saying welcome.
Then paint me in.
 
Robert Lowes

Robert Lowes is a writer in St. Louis, Missouri, whose first collection of poetry, An Honest Hunger, was published in 2020. In 2017, he took up the guitar, acoustic and electric, and began playing songs by artists that  he had never really appreciated before- Tom Petty, John Mellencamp, David Bowie. He hopes to rock on for a long time. You can find samples of Robert's poetry and journalism at robertlowes.com.