after La Voix de l’absolue  (Une dans l’univers), a painting by René Magritte

Magritte painted this rose (I assume)
     before getting tangled in string theory
but nineteen years his senior      Einstein was around
     to whisper wild new codes of space and light     
into the fertile garden of an artist’s mind

a rose     no doubt unique in the universe
     (that place with no edge and no center)
but a thing of unerring rescue     a more
     here inside the vastness     gentle absolute     
flashing slow petal by slow petal

trans-rational yardstick of all we behold
     sitting quite still     even a toddler gets it
the enormity of staring at a rose waiting
     as if to speak or dance or explain Einstein   
to be sure a hitch in ordinary sightings     

not to certify the voice     (you do not certify holy issue
     you just accept it)     without the rose
I am a starving man with no mouth   
     an apostrophe in a grotesque joke
a clock bravely grading infinity

second by fleeting second

William Landis

is a graduate of Oberlin College, 1951 and St. Louis Univ. in 1956. In 1970, he retired from dentistry to continue private studies in painting and poetry. He has paintings in private collections about the world and often writes about visual art. He has traveled widely, managing to reside in Andalusia, Amsterdam, Mykonos, Puerto Vallarta, and in rural France. He has one chapbook, Noguchi et al. and is looking to publish three others, Magritte Dismembered, Where Thunder Sleeps, and White Fire in Sunlight. He is winner of the Ad Schuster Annual Citation Grand Prize in ’01 and Annual Grand Prize Ina Coolbrith Circle, `09, and many other prizes, has been published in Runes, Pudding House. Convolvulus, Poetalk, Peralta Press, Minotaur Press, Carcinas Review, and the Cloudview Anthology of Master Classes with David St. John. He has a blog site of some poems and recent digital artwork: willlandis.blogspot.com


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