Olmec Head, by Anon. (Mexico) c. 900-400 BCE, by John Claiborne Isbell

Olmec Head, by Anon. (Mexico) c. 900-400 BCE. photo by Utilisateur:Olmec Wikimedia Creative Commons.

Olmec Head, by Anon. (Mexico) c. 900-400 BCE
 
Here is an Olmec head. I had been turning
the pages of 10,000 Years of Art,
examining the primitives – Cycladic
or Neolithic figures, petroglyphs
and drinking cups – and stumbled onto this
raw lump of basalt. And there is a gloss
beside each object, but what stayed my hand
is what the sculptor made; A face to carve
an empire with, a man might say, where ridge
and furrow settle over cheek and jaw
and stylized eyebrow, cut into the rock
 
to make a ruler out of it, as if
some god had called the stone to life. The mouth
is slightly open, to breathe or command;
the sightless eyes are fixed on nothing seen
by tourists or museumgoers. Note
the way the ideal penetrates the real
in every feature. Those who ask for art 
will find it here, before the Aztecs came.
To meet the man thus blazed into the rock –
to know that face – I could. But I could not
expect to see the force that makes of it
a thing transformed by power and by light.
 
 John Claiborne Isbell
 ​ 
John Claiborne Isbell is a writer and now-retired professor currently living in Paris with his wife Margarita. Their son Aibek lives in California. John grew up in the United States and Europe: Italy, France, Great Britain, Germany. His first book of poetry was Allegro (2018); he also publishes literary criticism, for instance An Outline of Romanticism in the West (2022) and Destins de femmes: Thirty French Writers, 1750-1850 (2023), both available free online. John spent thirty-five years playing Ultimate Frisbee, representing France in the European Championships in 1991, and finds it difficult not to dive for catches any more.