Two Poems by Tony Williams

The Grue Bull’s Arse

At the side of Albrecht Dürer’s print of The Prodigal Son Among the Swine
there is a bull’s arse projecting in like the back end of a pantomime horse;
the viewer is invited to imagine the rest of the bull outside the frame.
In truth, since we can’t see it, the front half could really be a horse,
or a chaise longue; or perhaps the bull is arses at both ends.

One thing we know for sure is that Dürer, who made the engraving around 1495,
had not read Nelson Goodman’s classic Fact, Fiction, and Forecast,
which posits the quality grue, that is, a predicate applying to green things
up to a certain time t, and then blue things thereafter. Goodman
is interested in the problem of inductive reasoning: how do we know that grass
will remain green, and won’t, when time t happens to occur,
turn out to have been grue all along? Which is to say,
Dürer might have been convinced that the bull’s arse
was the arse of a normal bull, but he might unwittingly have drawn the arse
of as it were a grue bull, one of the ones which, at time t, don’t turn blue but instantly
transmogrify so that their front end is now all horse. How
can we be sure what kind of bull we can’t quite see?

Or, if that seems fanciful, look at the buildings that surround the yard.
You will recognise (I expect) the architecture of medieval Franconia,
and more precisely of Nürnberg, where Dürer had recently returned
from his trip to study with Bellini in Venice. There can be no doubt
that the master drew, or thought he drew, the vast steep gables
and barely punctuated walls of the city
that was really there around him, at the time.
But, for all he knew, the roofs and facades of the print are actually grue,
where time t for once is known: up until the 2nd of January 1945
the medieval originals are depicted, but after that date
the engraving represents instead the meticulous
reconstructions that were built in the Fifties,
the originals being lost to high explosives and incendiary bombs,
so that what we see now is the prodigal son
conjured by Christ in His Galilean twang but dressed as a German churl
ashamed to be jostling with the swine but more amazed
to find himself a vagrant in this place or hardly that,
an ersatz outline of a place now unalterably lost,
a late facsimile and flimsy mise-en-scène
in which the endless dawning of his knowledge
can befall: he himself is changed, he must go back
to find the point he started from, to bless it with his trust
it has not changed and never will, to ask for forgiveness and welcome.

A Jigsaw of Berthe Morisot’s The Cradle

Everyone knows what it’s like,
doing a jigsaw: how you start
by picking out the edges, make
a frame on the table, hoping
the fog in that window will clear,
over time, if you put in the effort.

Next you look for the easy bits,
the ribbon or is it tortoiseshell
choker the mother wears, her red
lips, her fingers idly caressing
the hem of the veil, and coax
glimpses here and there of what’s to be.

Her face, her blue-and-black striped jacket,
the veil’s looping frill are all
harder than they first appear
(her baby’s almost blank face!);
you gather the pieces, think you have them
but they’re not yet ready to emerge.

Only by a long and concentrated gaze
can she see what’s really there.
All art is tenderness that looks
and looks till things shrug off their names
and are by looking finally disclosed
to patience and to love.

And ever deeper now her vision
lingers on the lace, the darkened wall,
and what and how can penetrate the veil:
she knows, you know, there is a little piece
that in the box is nothing much
but makes this world complete.

Tony Williams lives and works in Northumberland. His work has been shortlisted for the Aldeburgh, Michael Murphy and Portico prizes. His most recent collection is Hawthorn City (Salt, 2019).