portrait once removed

Identity

 

BY W. S. MERWIN

 

 

When Hans Hofmann became a hedgehog

somewhere in a Germany that has

vanished with its forests and hedgerows

Shakespeare would have been a young actor

starting out in a country that was

only a word to Hans who had learned

from those who had painted animals

only from hearing tales about them

without ever setting eyes on them

or from corpses with the lingering

light mute and deathly still forever

held fast in the fur or the feathers

hanging or lying on a table

and he had learned from others who had

arranged the corpses of animals

as though they were still alive in full

flight or on their way but this hedgehog

was there in the same life as his own

looking around at him with his brush

of camel hair and his stretched parchment

of sheepskin as he turned to each sharp

particular quill and every black

whisker on the long live snout and those

flat clawed feet made only for trundling

and for feeling along the dark undersides

of stones and as Hans took them in he

turned into the Hans that we would see

 

 

Source: Poetry (July/August 2009).

 

 

* * *

 

 

Ennio Morricone: “March Of The Beggars”

from Sergio Leone’s “Giù la testa” (1971)

 

Done