Mark McMorris

Another Poem on Nudes

What more is there to say about the future

of sea-scapes and lilac, the power of machines

and the omnipresence of noise in the plazas

where once we heard nothing, except the falling

of water in a cistern, the round stone basin

calmly present during the transit of Venus

What more is there to say about tambourines

that mimic the bells on a leather saddle, strapped

to a horse you rode across the Chinese tundra

or rode over a dune into the sand sea below

the line between noise and music is inside you

like a moving shadow on the face of a clock

What more is there to say about metrical forms

the duration of syllables, what is the optimal spacing

between wind and fiddle, or scythe and deliver

what hiatus halts the ictus, what vowel tunes

the tympanum when a pianist conjures elegies

to his mistress, the line between nude and naked

always was mysterious, until I saw the bare bones

reclining on a divan next to the coffee maker

like a futurist in love with modern technology

like Goya’s Origin of the World or like Manet’s

Olympia with a black cat nearby, so frankly

sexual that the Venus of Urbino was offended.