Harlequin's Carnival, by Maximilian Heinegg

Harlequin's Carnival, by Joan Miro (Spain) 1925

Harlequin’s Carnival     
           at the Joan Miro exhibit, NYC            

Into the mute music I went, 
my eyes became my ears.

Waltzing the welcome, 
room to rediscovered room, 
each canvas a ladder to an eclipse, 
a mountain’s black triangle 
beside the swirling red 
joy-path, & inside, the festival:

a guitar as an infant sees it,    
& beneath the sky’s tracery,
blue-black eyes spiring 
within circles, sporadic birds  
that dot & dovetail what might 
be birds, & better than paint 

tucking lovers in a night sky,
without gravity. How can the sky 
not be entire, this conscious blue 
the seed of my dreaming?

Maximilian Heinegg

Maximilian Heinegg's work has appeared in 32 Poems, Thrush, Nimrod, The Cortland Review, and Glass: Poets Resist, among others. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, won the Sidney Lanier Poetry Award, and been a finalist for the poetry prizes of Crab Creek Review, Cutthroat, Twyckenham Notes, December Magazine, Rougarou Journal, and Asheville Poetry Review. He is a high school English teacher, as well as a singer-songwriter whose records can be heard at www.maxheinegg.com