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Pareidolia, by Daniel J. Pizappi

11/29/2017

1 Comment

 
Picture
Isle of the Dead, by Arnold Böcklin (Switzerland). 1880.
Pareidolia

Some say Böcklin dreamt the Isle of the Dead
and spent the rest of his life trying to paint it.

Some say each snowflake sets out to reproduce 
a dreamflake, but the clouds are careless copyists.

Nabokov said the Isle on a wall is part of 
every Berlin home, like a roof or running water.

Maybe Böcklin’s dream is dreamt by each of us,
even if they’re his initials on the cave-tomb’s door. 

Maybe I dreamt a poem once, at least its contours,
and have spent the rest of my life trying to write it. 

Maybe every poem is really the same elegy, the same 
suicide note, reflected in a shattered funhouse mirror,

leaving you, me, anyone to pick up the pieces.
Each pearl conceals a grain of sand—but try to find it.

Of course, Böcklin didn’t paint and repaint the Isle
to realize his undying fixation, his dream of death,

but to satisfy his patrons and their commissions, 
his landlords and their past-due notices. 

And maybe this was never about the obsession
of the painter, the poet, the clouds, but of each of us

and our insatiable hunger for pattern, for meaning.
And maybe you can tell me: do we ever find it? 

Daniel J. Pizappi

This poem was written for the surprise ekphrastic I See a Darkness challenge.
​
Daniel J. Pizappi grew up in New York’s Hudson River Valley and currently lives in Knoxville, Tennessee. He is a PhD student, Managing Editor of Grist: A Literary Journal, and co-editor of Kentucky Writers: The Deus Loci and the Lyrical Landscape (Des Hymnagistes Press, 2016). His work has appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Burningword, and The Schawangunk Review.
Picture
Isle of the Dead, by Arnold Böcklin (Switzerland). 1883.
Picture
Isle of the Dead, by Arnold Böcklin (Switzerland). 1886.
1 Comment
Garth Ferrante
11/29/2017 05:58:19 pm

This is my response both to the image and your writing:

you know it and i know it, we both know that there are reasons why we come back to this thing to see what we can see, if there's anything in the clouds, in the stuttering motion of the waves, in the reflections that don't really indicate a sky so much as a time of day, and always a dull morning or a dull evening, never anything that glows in the dark, never anything that makes us feel like we're just about to spark to life...no, those days are over some would say, especially when they got a look at the title of the piece, then it'd be game over and no one would want to celebrate it...what's there to celebrate, they'd ask, it's death, after all, and no one wants anything to do with it...it frightens people, it alarms them, it makes them want to get away from anyone bringing it closer and closer to them because for all the science in the world, people are still superstitious, they're still caught in a web of old fears and atavistic tendencies that not only threaten to return, but threaten to increase in both degree and severity, and these things don't just threaten, they are revelations of what the future is sure to bring...we've been here before, you and me, we've traveled here in our dreams and nightmares and times when we wished we could sleep, wished we could shrug off the world and the problems it gave us that day, because weren't all our problems just the same problem we had to deal with over and over again?...it's alright, i can say as much now that i know that it all went back to stepping away when it was called for and stepping in when it was time, and i also know that i didn't have the wisdom to distinguish between these so that sometimes i opened my mouth when i should have been listening and at others i did nothing when i had a feeling i was going to regret it...these are what rise up from the still waters to intercede between me getting to that isle: i'm not "done" yet and it's because i got a very late start, it's because, really, i have only just begun and i'm ashamed to hold my head up and say these things before the lonely place i must go over day...that is not today and part of me wants it to be because if i can utter with the tongue of the dead all these things from when i was alive with you, then why can i not actually feel alive despite continuing to draw breath, why can't i get rid of you for once and all now that our future is no longer one that's intertwined but has been cleaved in two the way it always should have been...you go about your life, i'll do the same with mine...yet tree really are dreams, there are nightmares, there are times when i cannot sleep and you are there again and i can't rid myself of you...this is worse than having to accept my place on that tomb island because you don't belong anywhere near me anymore, yet there you are, the same problem rising up to meet me, to intercede between where i am and where i must one day go, and it makes so little sense with you having been gone for so long, with me having resolved what you'd always represented to me, but all during the last week or two, there you've been when i look over and that i don't tell you go fuck off on the spot makes me think there's something very wrong with me, that the trusting kid i used to be so someone i've never stopped being and that it's him who's summoning you because you're the one who spoke the vows even though i'd choked on them that day, same as you...but there's nothing to see, nothing to know, we know whatever has been because it's come and gone, and you aren't really you, just the shade of the one i wanted you to be, which is why it's so easy for me to hate myself these days...

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