Lisa Brockwell #23 Bruegel and the Big Boys

Bruegel and the Big Boys

after Bruegel’s  Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

It was on my mind for a while.  And it took me

two days to even see the legs, I kept looking

and not finding him.  This gave me a thrill –

the world is getting on with life, no one

is standing still to hale and grieve

a narcissist who wanted too much of the sun.

I had forgotten it was a painting

the big boys had well and truly picked over.

Jack Gilbert going for a glass half full

and erasing the fall entirely,

spoken like a confirmed adulterer:

marriages don’t fail, people just ‘grow apart’

or trade in for a younger model, no

failure in that, never mind.

But when I remembered Auden and Williams

I didn’t want to write my poem anymore,

I put it away, though I now think

there’s still a lot to say.  I see joy:

we are all at the centre of our own lives,

so dignified for the ploughman, the shepherd,

the washerwoman.  But the big boys

feel jumpy, I imagine them reaching

between their shoulder blades to check

the wax is solid.  They praise the lack

of limelight in the frame but I hear

in their words it unnerves them.  For most

of us life is a landscape we move

through.  It is rare to sit for a portrait.