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De Chirico's Portrait of Poets

What nostalgia could a poet possibly have?

Every past is present to him: every street

And public square the childhood yard he’d left

 

For which he keeps hankering in the present

By his words that are always stale like

Yesterday’s news brittle decrepit a wrapping

 

For dried fish he’d preserved like the fragile

Heart he protects inside the silver gills

Of the spoiled scad he pinned to an obelisk

 

And autumn is falling in space with its

Brown colors the veined network of leaf

Floating among the columns of an arcade

The riddle of a girl wheeling her hoop

Both shadow and silhouette towards an empty

Wagon towards the shadow of her death

 

The hint of a horseman always arriving

Or leaving the frame: in ignominy and shame

Furtive in the dusk like the poet in both

 

His audacity and cowardice: the philosopher

Confusing the epistemology of his portrait

In marble and the mannequin’s stitched waist

 

Which is also the poet’s bust both

Flint and flesh French and Greek sitting

On the plinth de Chirico imagined

 

Inside his harlequin brain where a dry

Fountain stands on the empty square behind

The Ray-Ban dark of Apolinaire’s sunglasses.

 

Marne Kilates

13 October 2014; Rev. 19 Nov 2018

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Giorgio de Chirico: (From top left) 

The Philosopjher Poet. The Nostalgia of Poets,

and Mystery & Melancholy of a Street

giorgio-de-chirico-mystery-and-melanchol
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