"He wants to wonder not look so

he points to the skull which has rolled

lost its socket, jaw gone and there's a brass

spout-neck pot hung from a chain in an alcove

where drink should come but it's tipped too forward

a bit in a hover, a gold offering plate just below

what's that white stripe just next prayer shawl

straight out with black snooze edge wipe

roll too long let out modern paint straight edge wipe

or adhesive tape ripped free leaves a swath of light?

Bordering that is a door edge its various darks,

such rules, such flint absence of palaver

the leather tomes piled out to float over

a possible foolish doorway drop, stand aside,

and the retort bulb of ink hugged further back

shelf lip to corner samovar could never warm up to cover.

It's not a coven it's a cell and all the adding up

of storages there forces there to be a knowledge there

if one could longly hold one's head the right in air

in crimson tapped or portal mapped the blue range

with lusted tree in winds of the antabuse sea.

It's an oil in the oil of coming to be, the

coiled off wisdom in a strapped book delicate

of its own ledge angled and blackness stored

which also stores the pen the discus hat the

skull its position in hoardy rhymes of the word

the turn to the why is it always righthand

casement of the sun on a town of porters idling and

cows of the stalwart darkest jade-green bush, thread of onyx

the stork sack of salt things behind him in a drop

to the fire wall of keenest pipe soot, bridled

to a shell, no haze, in fact a thought so clear

the jesus is crossed out tiny from shade of its tendril niche

and the bird invisible in its radio cage next space

nothing soars for the moment nothing is strained

to the thought pounced to brightest bolt of jet

the murmurs flee here the finger to the bone

of the word no nearer known is the point to a 

task so barely opened the lips lock in purse

no further adept, no one's liquor in the world

tracing of the looks back to angle's end

in point blank he shows

in step left

the ceiling lengths burn"

--Clark Coolidge, 

first section of "Jerome in His Study,"

in Solution Passage: Poems 1978-1981

(It took me quite a bit of looking around on the internet to find this painting, by Joos van Cleve, which the poem is "after." It's in the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard; their website dates it 1524-30, while Coolidge has "after Joos van Cleve the Elder, 1521." The poem becomes much more "transparent" when read next to the painting. It's an odd sort of ekphrastic writing, that somehow stays close to image detail by detail while letting in a lot of extraneous noise and thought--almost like a score for the eyes to "perform" the painting by: "tracing of the looks." I love the comparison, in passing, of the hanging shawl to a roll of toilet paper and then to the bright strip that remains when you remove a length of painted-over masking tape. And the moment of wondering why the windows are so often on the righthand sides in Renaissance interiors. And the way metaphoric description clutters up or clusters around each thing in the picture: "the stork sack of salt thongs," or "lusted tree in winds of the antabuse sea." I'm baffled by that last--antabuse, I learn from the internet, is a drug used since the 50s to treat alcoholism, and comes in small white pills.)