Robert Murray Davis
Poems

At the Hungarian National Gallery: Self-Portraits

Props endure, no matter what the style:
headgear, brushes, facial hair, and eyes,
often a palette and half-shadowed face.

In Romantic times,
slant of a mountain, swirling clouds,
thrust of a tree or wall
anchor the background,
offset wisps of moustache or assertive beard
glued to the chin like fur.
This is who I am, the faces plead.
Take me to your heart.

By 1910, it's in your face.
Style is the man himself:
peaks and swirls make up the skull,
arms and chin form double angles
to fence out the world,
panels and careful smears compose the face.
Eyes, hard, wary, sad,
do not seek love.

Some, aging and maturing, cut the crap.
Réti abandoned paint,
sketched himself sketching,
nude, belly out,
hair and chin receding,
back to the nude girl pressed against a wall,
eyes focused on the work we cannot see.

At the Christian Museum, Esztergom

Scene after holy scene:
George and the dragon, Catherine and the wheel,
Christopher (decommissioned) and his bulk,
Imre, the lily, and the knee bent so,
all, save Sebastian with his loincloth slipped,
wardrobed to the taste of those who brushed.
Even the Crucifixion comes to seem
collage of old motifs in different styles.

How much did they believe?
In Memling's "Man of Sorrows" it's art—
if not quite solely for the sake of art.
Then, with chiaroscuro and receding planes,
technique triumphs.

The man who signed his work MS
blended form and faith.
His Christ, eyes hollow and cheeks gaunt,
has died to pay out all.

Before that, figures on a golden field
portray the mystery suitably estranged.

Piety, said Maritain, cannot replace technique.
Assume the inverse:
faith itself may steam
from forms we have outgrown.

At the Budapest Fine Arts Museum

"...where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."
Luke 12.34

Italian primitives used sheeted gold
to figure timelessness in which the blessed stood.

In Titian's "Doge," gold foregrounds in the cloak
that imaged earthly power.

A richer gold shines from Van Rijn's beef,
illuminating all the common scene,
flesh by flesh redeemed.

At Any Historical Museum

The people displaced tribes
whose names we barely know.
They pounded stone or bronze
to slice or poke
soil, grain, or flesh.
The women were adorned,
and more and more the men and what they used.
They shaped containers for their artifacts,
shelters to lie down and make
what passed for love in,
fought to keep or stretch their lands,
were buried in degrees of state
We loot to know them by.

---

Robert Murray Davis is an American scholar and poet, a frequent visitor to Hungary since his term as a Fulbright Professor of English at Eötvös University in the 1980s.