I Just Wanted to Write About De Chirico, by Anurak Saelaow

Hector and Andromache, by Giorgio De Chirico (France). 1912.

I Just Wanted to Write About De Chirico

               who, with a shrug of the wrist,
ducked away from the whole heaving weight
of Homer’s glance, leaving us to decrypt
the anxious crisis of these figures huddled
on their parapet. Rootless and inorganic,
buttressed and shod, they stand effaced
above the sunless plaza. Meaning:
here is landscape sans reference, framed
and fraught, a map composed only
of itself. And yet — these neuter objects,
flat-crotched and eyeless, retain just enough
of their stance and tilt that they still read
as guileless blazons of affection. I want
heraldry of a similar stripe — two mannequins
displayed Or, a sloped neck of marble
and wood — this spindly apparatus
of life without life. Giorgio, leaning
on the wrong side of the canvas,
understood this: that the urge of motion
stands orthogonal to happenstance.
The spirit pawing always at the edge
of porosity. That even as Troy resumes
its rude intrusion, we step away
on the delicate feet of birds.

Anurak Saelaow

Anurak Saelaow is a Singaporean poet and writer. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Hayden's Ferry Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Eunoia Review, and Ceriph Magazine, amongst other places. He is the author of one chapbook, Schema (The Operating System, 2015), and holds a BA in creative writing and English from Columbia University.