Upon seeing the nth shot of feet/food/selfie...or peonies

"I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions

that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings

and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance

displaying their capital letters like license plates.

Truth cantering on a powerful horse,

Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils.

Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat,

Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended,

Villainy sharpening an instrument behind a wall,

Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm.

They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes.

Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator.

Valor lies in bed listening to the rain.

Even Death has nothing to do but mend his cloak and hood,

and all their props are locked away in a warehouse,

hourglasses, globes, blindfolds and shackles.

Even if you called them back, there are no places left

for them to go, no Garden of Mirth or Bower of Bliss.

The Valley of Forgiveness is lined with condominiums

and chain saws are howling in the Forest of Despair.

Here on the table near the window is a vase of peonies

and next to it black binoculars and a money clip,

exactly the kind of thing we now prefer,

objects that sit quietly on a line in lower case,

themselves and nothing more, a wheelbarrow,

an empty mailbox, a razor blade resting in a glass ashtray.

As for the others, the great ideas on horseback

and the long-haired virtues in embroidered gowns,

it looks as though they have traveled down

that road you see on the final page of storybooks,

the one that winds up a green hillside and disappears

into an unseen valley where everyone must be fast asleep."

– Billy Collins, The Death of Allegory

Student of clouds

(all photographs by Anvita Lakhera)

Student of Clouds
by Billy Collins

The emotion is to be found in clouds,
not in the green solids of the sloping hills
or even in the gray signatures of rivers,
according to Constable, who was a student of clouds
and filled shelves of notebooks with their motion,
their lofty gesturing and sudden implication of weather.

Outdoor, he must have looked up thousands of times,
his pencil trying to keep pace with their high voyaging
and the silent commotion of the eddying and flow.
Clouds would move beyond the outlines he would draw
as they moved within themselves, tumbling into their centers
and swirling off at the burning edges in vapors
to dissipate into the universal blue of the sky.

In photographs we can stop all this movement now
long enough to tag them with their Latin names.
Cirrus, nimbus, stratocumulus -
dizzying, romantic, authoritarian -
they bear their titles over the schoolhouses below
where their shapes and meanings are memorized.

High on the soft blue canvases of Constable
they are stuck in pigment but his clouds appear
to be moving still in the wind of his brush,
inching out of England and the nineteenth century
and sailing over these meadows where I am walking,
bareheaded beneath the cupola of motion,
my thoughts arranged like paint on a high blue ceiling.

(Constable's study of clouds can be viewed here)