Two Poems on Two Cutting the Stone Paintings, by Evan Gurney

Cutting the Stone, by Hieronymus Bosch (Netherlands) 1500

Cutting the Stone
​
Are you cutting the stone, they ask,
but do not stay for an answer.
They call me quacksalver and walk away
laughing. Let them smirk at my hat,
they cannot see the wisdom funneled
from heaven. Let them sneer at my wife,
who wears her helmet of sacred writ
and so keeps free from temptation.
Let them send the famous painter to make
of me an allegory for the world’s madness. 
 
Here is what I would say if they would listen:
folly is not a stone but a bulb, a slender
teardrop planted in the living soil
of your mind, more fertile than this
Flemish countryside. A man’s madness
takes root here in the brain, his folly will rot
and fester if it never finds the outside air. 

See my patient lashed there to the chair
in white linen: he has a mind for flowers,
he has saxifrage blooming from within,
and I will send him home to his wife
happy and holding a wreath in his hand.

Your mind, too, is a garden that needs tending.
Come, sit down, and be cured.

Cutting the Stone, by Jan Steen (Netherlands) c. 1656-1675

Harvest of Stones

Somewhere close by, I swear it, there’s a goddamned crow
cackling as I scream, but I’m held to this chair by twine
and all I can see are pebbles dropping into the pan below

like a string of Spanish olives. Once more I feel the knife pressed
against my skull, a stab of pain, and another stone drops:
who could believe there’s room in one head for this harvest?

Don’t be a fool, they said, everybody knows that surgeon
is a quack, and he probably is, judging by the big bag
of money at his wife’s waist and her satisfied grin,

but he’s good with a blade, whatever else they say about him,
I saw the guy cut up one of those alligators fresh from Peru--
he sliced the scales lickety split, then stuffed it neat and trim.

And if I’m sport for spectators, the neighbours come to laugh
on their way to the thief’s hanging at noon, or maybe a play,
big Frank standing by with his pipe, king of the riffraff,

their talk’s no worse than usual. Anyway I’m past all shame,
too dizzy for work, head gone soft and eyes wonky,
and there’s no pity for a man whose legs aren’t lame,

so here I am, hair pulled back and stuck in this chair,
out three weeks of wages on the off chance I’m healed,
whatever those old birds, just out of sight, caw in my ear.

Evan Gurney

Evan Gurney is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina Asheville. His poems and essays have appeared recently in New Ohio Review, storySouth, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere.