Farfel & Rogers – February 2024

Hoyt Rogers and Ruth Farfel traded art and words. Ruth shared this image, titled “Nephew,” with Hoyt:

In response, Hoyt wrote this poem:

Nephew

By one of those eerie
historic short-circuits,
this picture recalls Titian’s wistful portrait
of Ranuccio Farnese, a “cardinal-nephew”
who wasn’t a nephew at all, but the grandson of a pope;
at twelve, not elevated yet, he wears the Malta insignia
as foreplay: just a boy, an ersatz knight, bewildered
by the silver cross, the oversize black coat, the gold
hilt of the hidden sword, the crimson brocade
with its white ruff and codpiece, as useless as
the crumpled glove he dangles from his hand
in obedience to his fate; just so, the icon here
depicts that mystery in a different mode:
centered on a massive overdose of cloth,
a child’s expectant face, swaddled not
in consciousness like a new-born god
in a Virgin’s arms, but only waiting for what
must come, the future that enfolds the fuller
body, allowing only the glaucous eyes, the red lips,
the blue, mismatched wings of a fragile collar, and
a small hand, powerless as Ranuccio’s,
to surface now, while the loving waves
of the coverlet engulf the time to come,
though can’t prevent the snowy billows
from shedding grey overtones
even as they hasten to protect
the boy from what
all of us must live.

* * * * *

Hoyt shared this poem with Ruth:

Virgilio Paints a Seascape

Landscapes, continents crowd the galleries. But islands never lose sight of the sea. The light blows more swiftly through our trees, the gri gris and palms split and bow in tropical winds, blasted by destruction and freedom. The chance to be reborn. The land is eclipsed, washed back through shoal after shoal. Now, the chance to die. Blue, green, yellow, orange, red, purple withdrawn into the brown of a cowl, where a saint’s grey face looks down at the coral reefs we’ve bleached, an upturned skull.

From a green thought in a green shade, to a grey thought in a greying shade. The difference is, that we know. We wear our grief, and it is blind; ‘but we, in a manner, see.’ Our writing on the wall becomes an endless quotation: a grim delight in otherworldliness, here in this world. The passage about Cape Horn, the vision of those whales in liquid light, the spume of their answers and questions, fictive and real. The Amazon also exists, without any personal proof: it coils through the mind.

I swim and swim with you for several hours, so now I’ll never leave. Your blue-black fishtail leads me through a kaleidoscope of anemones. Of feeders and predators. Of gaping holes and lattices: the irised, torn facade of what we call the everyday. The planet we’ve gutted; the discards that remain. Where wilderness is an artifice, a luxury, a Bierstadt or Church, an impressive view. Where seascapes are revolving wheels, plastic sargassos, sluggish hurricanes of bags, wrappers, jugs. 

In response, Ruth made this image, titled “Saint Watches it All”: