Time Management
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After The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch
There were days Bosch felt like hell
and days he felt like the garden,
the pup-pink fountain. Milk air
skimmed and spored and over it.
Which ideas are gimmicky
and which part of the malformed carnival
of truth? What needs to happen
round a shed-sized fruit? The answers vary.
Usually he felt like the garden, where
he could cram creatures, moloch berries,
nougat and truffle humans; the porcupine
could levitate in a bubble, storks lecture camels
on their gait, mermaids float in tail-matching
armour, the girl listen rapt to her date
with the neckless head of a rugby ball, indigo
berry suddenly a throat, lips not in the picture.
The outer panel’s more minimal.
Close the wings and you get creation, suspended
in a lazy dark, with only God hovering top left
over his post-dinosaur carpet
(similar orbs float on Canary Wharf,
beneath JP Morgan, serving Swiss
snack selections). Certainly less work
than the inner panel, with which
he must have been carried away
for years. So what that it was okay to call it
a day? Does delight ever feel done? And hell
will come, whether or not you schedule it.
.
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Nasim Luczaj is the author of Hind Mouth (Earthbound Press) and an editor of Wet Grain. Her work has appeared in Granta, Wasafiri, Poetry London, Oxford Poetry and elsewhere. She translates between Polish and English.
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