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after Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Everything looks rough-hewn and doltish
and has done since my eyes
began to betray me unreliably now I peer
through thick blue saucers of glass
yet feel how these strangers stir us—
this one with the pinched face of a carpenter
more than king though the bold red
of his sleeves and collar and the aureate bowl
his fingers dandle appear to be rich indeed
and wholly out of place in our stable yard
where we find this squalling child
reluctant and bollock-naked as far as I see
then this older one with his lank grey hair
stooping as if to show off his ermine trim
and his extraordinarily long pink sleeves
(I see them more clearly than anything else)
he positions his hat and mace in the dirt
to offer something I can’t make out
beside me the black skin and sharp leather smell
of the third who proffers an elaborate gift
of green and yellow—it must be gold and jade
yet smells sweetly of spices to me
a sort of sweetness like nothing I’ve known
and I can tell you I’m good with odours
even better with my ears which are sharp enough
to trace the munching commentary
of the ass in the byre the shifting of the crowd
and the hiss of doltish Piet with his lips
to the poor father’s ear telling him I suppose
what we all know of the difference
in their ages and the ominous signs
from the fractious boy even the fact the child
cannot possibly be his—shit-for-brains Piet
in his green snood has never been one to look
beyond the obvious not one to let gossip
go abegging yet the mother’s face has
turned now half-obscured as if she wants us
to believe there’s something in all this
not the sighted nor the blind can fathom
some secret she and her strangers are keeping
© Martyn Crucefix, from Spring of the Muses: the poetry of music, art and dance, ed. Deborah Gaye (Avalanche Books, 2019)
Picture 12947715, painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1564, image copyright Mary Evans / Pictures Now Collection
Martyn Crucefix’s recent publications are Cargo of Limbs (Hercules Editions, 2019), These Numbered Days, translations of the poems of Peter Huchel (Shearsman, 2019) and The Lovely Disciplines (Seren, 2017). O. at the Edge of the Gorge, was also published by Guillemot Press in 2017. Martyn has translated the Duino Elegies – shortlisted for the 2007 Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation – and Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke and the Daodejing – a new version in English (Enitharmon, 2016). He is currently a Royal Literary Fund fellow and blogs regularly on poetry, translation and teaching at http://www.martyncrucefix.com