Eye Moderne a la Mode

The vision of a voyeur tracing mirrors
With a lipstick and a laugh, is modern art.
It’s a simple, simpler, simplest
Economy of less, and less, and less
—Less time to trail the detail into point,
Less ear for the confusing clear of fugues,
Less wish to utter troubles to the abiding dove.
We are the mercury mirror of, of
We know not what—but it is not “love.”

Our Grandfathers drove Dodges and so do we.
The comic modern is our métier,
A race to wrench awry Reality’s real
And here and bare, and substitute
A vivider, savvier, lesser seems
For our living Is.
Snapshots of the soul
(Stand-in cut-outs at their propped-up best)
Can’t take mediated place, thrum and throne,
Of sarcophagi, stained glass, and saints.

—No, that’s wrong. They can, and do.
And the mirror herself becomes a little thinner,
Less and less the magic thing she was,
A poverty of posture in the cornered air,
Less vaunting and less vair, more haunted
Than inhabited: each bold look boiled to a stare.

But there, there—the palimpsest remains,
Tracings of the tracer tracing trivially,
Temporal blots and bleedings
Moaning on into long Eternity,
The wreckage of our lives not half done,
Not half said, raw evidence for eyes
That once upon a time we were not dead,
That “a kiss was still a kiss,” a hiss a hiss,
Whatever it was our lying lipstick said.