David Salner
Surviving in a Painting by Hieronymus Bosch
1.
My working life prepared me for his world.
I toiled like one of Bosch’s wretches
while furnaces spouted fire,
earth-wounds unleashing brimstone
from the molten core. That’s me
in a corner of the canvas, at the stake,
trussed to a midnight shift, the devil
breathing fire on my toes.
I’m one of the unrepentant serfs.
I wring out sweat
from my bad-ass bandana. Or,
I’m lashed to the breaking wheel
and the Director of Behavior Management,
a skull with voice-box, corrects me,
chanting a list of do’s and don’ts,
corrects me again, because he knows
his preaching doesn’t take, it never will,
and all the while a soundtrack plays
hell’s music: rasp of gears,
screech of screw and rack,
base thud of iron pestles
grinding my given years to something
granular, a sand of days, of shifts,
of hours pulverized to minutes,
the powder of my life
to smithereens.
2.
But, ahh, the jokes were good
and made those shifts in Bosch’s world
halfway enjoyable, or almost half.
Nothing like a good laugh
when you’re eyeball to eyeball
with the prince of avarice.
3.
Today, having survived amid the shambles
of his world, I’m miles away from Bosch,
seated on a camp chair
enjoying a bottle of pinot noir
in the woods with you. The surf
is sounding in the distance. A pair of redwings
lights not far from us. Rare birds,
they present a lightning glimpse of red,
flashing their colors with a beat of wings,
red-black, red-black, as they fly off.
So much to dazzle us
on a good day in the woods.
But let’s not kid ourselves.
We haven’t seen the worst.
David Salner worked all over the country, as iron ore miner, steelworker, librarian, baseball usher, and in many other trades. His most recent poetry collections are The Green Vault Heist and Summer Words: New and Selected Poems, both appearing in 2023. His award-winning debut novel is A Place to Hide (2021. His poetry appears in Threepenny Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, and Valparaiso Poetry Review.https://DSalner.wixsite.com/salner