A Poem By Brian Blanchfield

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Pferd
Marino Marini, Bechtler Museum of Modern Art

Gift Swiss, holding American, art Italian, tradition
Boeotian. The diabetic buckles on the expo path,
dislodges the fizzy headset and — would it be cavalier
to add — misses in the Snapple retrieved for him

the incidental part Marini plays in the tour of art
a love poem once underwent, beloved incidental, he
on whose behalf from all the world’s unconcern
one circulating suitor contrived express concession.

Anyway if there is a homologue in the Frick what
can it mean in Charlotte, stooped at the centerpiece,
in powered-down posterity, in a sugar low,
North Carolina?
Not rearing, and no rider, right
or wrong, so by the four hooves bronzed
into the tray base no honorific casualty’s
inferred; but the stance braces, that is, informs

an agony, an agony then the horse’s alone, as though
to throw high and backward the head on the spine
were despair that the slab will slide. Groundless
the figurative foal in full maturity modern, that is,
oblique. What else call it to be cavalier, material,

about the pain of one you bring about to pain?
The controlled spill of more manufacture beneath
inheres in modernism but is, in area, the bed no
more of a boy who climbs into the toy to celebrate
his protracted trample, or to play at spartan sleep,
a mean and final floor to test his cheek for bone.

How often did he wake, the namesake child
whose congeries at angel level benefactors
rebuilt a home, and catch the study Ernst
had made of WC Fields, rotund as a commode,
twirling an umbrella made substantially of rain,
and revolve the pony patrolling spooks.

The hairless body so smooth the risen scoop
of orifice is more singular, ocular, and since
cleanly the spout and dress of tail has been, in
the signature stub above, arrested,
a medallion plumped, from there the line
leads the unrestricted eye beneath the rump to
the retractions of phallus in undercarriage
custody.
What is it supposed to mean, in Charlotte
or he’ll faint and seize, the sweetest, densest
thing you have and hurry, North Carolina? This
would have been just after the war. How again did
O’Hara do away with his Memorial Day 1950?

The stone in uprisen turmoil is the sculptor’s
work, but the patina on the flare of nostril
is the touch of the patrons’ children who
mounted the petered pony, locked
foursquare on its outspread hocks against
the flat pan of pewter as though it could escape
him, who mounted him and rubbed his
beestung or terror-fixed muzzle green. Did they
say that in your audiotour. I said,
Did they tell you that in your audio tour?

Brian Blanchfield is the author, newly, of A Several World, forthcoming early 2014 from Nightboat Books, and The History of Ideas, 1973–2012, a chapbook published by Spork Press.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at [email protected].