Max Ernst
I was Loplop, superior of the birds.
Eros made me into a machine,
but it was death that made me restless.
Frottage was my love
with all her textures.
And I was terrible inside her,
and my beauty was as one
who has not feared his affairs.
. . .That was how it was
before the Nazi’s took France,
and I was interned twice
as an enemy alien.
When I sailed to America
and married Peggy Guggenheim,
I painted the Antipope
between equestrian afternoons
with Leonora .
From there, poor Europe
seemed a dense wood,
and I was far above it
on a hill of granite
counting the crevices of its
marvelous textures.
When I went to Arizona
with Dorothea
it was like living inside
the landscape of an immense hunger,
as if I had returned home finally
to my childhood
in Bruhl
where my little bird died
at the birth of my sister.
It was a dark imperative
that drove Germany mad.
The grains in the paint,
the industrial block prints
that I had hand colored,
and raised from the obscurity
of mass production.
were symbols of nothing
and I was nothing with them.
You cannot
save a man
who has already been dead.
and I had been dead
since the first “World War.”
A signatory
of emptiness
and it’s caresses
Who rose over Europe
half bird, half man,
Degenerate artist
in the Haus der Kunst.
