Two Winter Pictures
        Très Riches Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry

1. January: A Very Fine Time, Indeed

Inside the rare book, a painting, in the painting
        a tapestry of knights crashing and falling
        in a cascade of helmets. It hangs in the banquet hall
where homely Due de Berry, among his retinue and gold plates,

welcomes guests from the cold: approche approche he says
        in gold-leaf. Hands stretched toward their patron or toward
        the fire they painted behind him, the Limbourg
brothers enter their masterpiece with their wives. In crafty gags

we can only guess at, the brothers set before us
a scene that translates Noblesse oblige as Be generous
        to artists. Small feathery dogs stroll companionably
        among platters of woodcock on the damasked table.

A knightly drinker is dwarfed by the gold bowl he drains
and the duke eclipsed by the glowing brocade
        only the rich could wear. Somehow the cocky courtiers
        deeply slighted the painters: from cup bearer (wearing one spur!)

and carver, the hilts of their daggers jut out just so—
pizzles prompted for coupling, but no likely place disposed.

2. February: Crying with a Loaf of Bread in Your Hands

        Leaving the shelter in January's
                lush illumination,
        we come to skim-milk snow,
                pewter sky, seedy rations

        pigeons pick from farmyard droppings.
                But through beehive and kindling
        in bundles, sheepcote and a donkey
                driven to a distant village,

        the painting shows a peasant life
                that might content a duke.
        Through cut-away walls of the quaint
                cottage he could look

        at clothes hung to dry by a modest fire
                that warms three figures.
        One is a woman in a blue dress
                that she lifts demurely

        to her knees. Behind her are men—
                we see when we look close—
        for they've hitched their wet tunics
                above their thighs to expose

        dangling genitals. A lampoon for—or on—
                a childless patron? Or on her?
        But she's learned to ignore the antics
                of her husband's celibate (since poor

        and landless) younger brothers. Farmhands
                on the farm that's never theirs,
        they fling seed, flail grain, gather fruit
                and never hope to marry;

        even a rude encounter in town
                takes hard cash. End of the road
        for their genes' long lines
                fizzling in the dangling stones

        they tease her with, in that damp house
                on a long-ago day
        imagined with fresh paint by living men
                while the matter of our own making

        coiled in thousands of nameless strangers
                with the dumb luck to escape
        siege, plague, prison, famine, and fire
                just long enough to mate

        with another sturdy soul, giving
                us the length of our bones, the black
        in our hair, a weakness for salt,
                and this strange run of luck.

Tweet

Copyright © 2022 Michelle Boisseau All rights reserved
from Luminous Blue Variables
BkMk Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission