— unpredictable thoughts

In their excess, their blowsy dream­ing
and King Solomon-like tem­pers, the clouds
pos­sess the grandeur of eighteenth-century oils,

when a painter earned his pro­fes­sion
as an anatomist. Those artists of verdi­gris
and gam­boge, too gorged on joy, perhaps,

treated that blank pas­ture of the “heav­ens”
like some­thing that had lived.
Their crawly undo­ings remind us

of the mean curiosi­ties of sheep, the sea’s
half-remembered boil, or a few twisted bolls
of cotton—the morn­ing phosphorescent

or sun­set a dull, worn-out gilt.
The nights there were scum­bled with light.
How could we ever have taken them

for the absti­nence of art?

by William Logan